Navigating Context Collapse - DiVA [PDF]

Department of Informatics & Media Digital Media & Society Uppsala University, Sweden

Navigating Context Collapse How Do Chinese Journalists Engage in Weibo Practices

Master’s Thesis Supervisor: Göran Svensson, Uppsala University

Author: Bo Bi Uppsala, May 2015

Bo Bi, 2015. Some rights reserved. See Appendix I I I for license. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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Abstract

At a time when traditional news organizations are struggling to grab the attention of audiences and survive in this digital age, social media, particularly microblogging services, have created novel opportunities for journalists to present themselves and connect with followers online. This has raised ethical issues that challenge the traditional journalistic principles and practices. As the boundaries between the public and private are increasingly blurred, journalists can use social media for both professional and personal use, which raises the questions of whether and to what extent traditional journalistic norms and standards are relevant and how they will change on the new medium platform. Several studies have been conducted on the influences of social media on professional norms and practices of journalism in the Western contexts. However, it is difficult to find in-depth qualitative research into what journalists themselves actually experience when they utilize social media as a professional tool in the Chinese context. To fill this gap, this exploratory study employs a blended ethnography/netnography approach to examine Chinese journalists’ practices on Weibo, the most popular social media platform in China. Based on data gathered from online participant observations and interviews, the study also investigates whether and to what extent core journalistic values are transformed on Weibo. Furthermore, it discusses the implications of the results for journalists, the field of journalism, and the society in China.

Keywords:

journalists,

social

media,

Weibo,

professionalism, Chinese journalism, microblogging

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practices,

norms,

values,

Acknowledgements

First of all, I am thankful to Göran Svensson, my supervisor, for his patient guidance, enthusiastic encouragement and constructive feedback. Also, I am greatly indebted to everyone who provided constructive criticisms to help me improve my thesis.

Furthermore, I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to all the people who have contributed their knowledge to this thesis. Special thanks to the journalists for their voluntary help and patience.

Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my parents and brother for their unconditional love, support and encouragement. Lastly, I also wish to thank my little nephew, Kairui, who has brought me so much joy when I was stresses by the thesis.

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Table of Contents Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................. v 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Journalism in Transition ...................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Topic of the Thesis: Transforming Journalistic Practices and Norms in Context Collapse. 3 1.3 The Different Context in China ........................................................................................... 5 1.4 Purpose of the Study and Research Questions .................................................................... 7 1.5 Significance of the Research ............................................................................................... 8 1.6 Outline of the Research Study............................................................................................. 9 2. Background ................................................................................................................................. 10 2.1 The Development of Social Media and Weibo in China ................................................... 10 2.1.1 The main differences between Weibo and Twitter ................................................. 11 2.2 Journalism in China .......................................................................................................... 16 2.3 Choice of Journalists ......................................................................................................... 18 3. Literature review ......................................................................................................................... 20 3.1 An overview of the field of online journalism .................................................................. 20 3.1.1 Technologically Oriented Research........................................................................ 20 3.1.2 Online News Production Research ......................................................................... 21 3.2 Review of Studies on Journalism and Weibo in China ..................................................... 24 4. Theoretical Framework ............................................................................................................... 26 4.1 Journalistic Norms and Values .......................................................................................... 26 4.1.1 Objectivity .............................................................................................................. 26 4.1.2 Gatekeeping ........................................................................................................... 27 4.1.3 Other Journalistic Norms ....................................................................................... 28 4.2 Social Media and Journalism ............................................................................................ 30 4.3 Context Collapse ............................................................................................................... 31 5. Methodology ............................................................................................................................... 33 5.1 Research Strategy .............................................................................................................. 33 5.1.1 A Combination of Qualitative and Quantitative Research ..................................... 33 5.1.2 Blended Ethnography/ Netnography ..................................................................... 34 5.2 Research Design and Process ............................................................................................ 37 5.2.1 Online Participant Observations............................................................................. 37 5.2.2 Semi-structured Interviews .................................................................................... 41 5.2.3 Data Analysis Strategies ......................................................................................... 52 5.3 Ethical Considerations ...................................................................................................... 57 5.3.1 An Ethical Dilemma in Online Participant Observation ........................................ 57 5.3.2 Data Collection on Social Media Platforms ........................................................... 58 5.3.3 Respect and Privacy in Interviews ......................................................................... 58 6. Results and Analysis ................................................................................................................... 60 6.1 Use of Weibo ..................................................................................................................... 60 6.1.1 Patterns of Daily Use ............................................................................................ 60 6.1.2 Motivations for Weibo Use ................................................................................... 62 6.1.3 How Do Journalists Identify Themselves on Weibo?............................................ 63

6.2 Transforming Journalistic Practices on Weibo .................................................................. 68 6.2.1 Overview of Journalists’ Weibo Posts ................................................................... 68 6.2.2 Recurring Themes in Weibo Posts ........................................................................ 69 6.2.3 Negotiation of Professional Practices ................................................................... 72 6.2.4 Summary ............................................................................................................... 78 6.3 Factors Influencing Journalists’ Use of Weibo .................................................................. 79 6.3.1 Organization Influence ........................................................................................... 79 6.3.2 Interaction with Other Users on Weibo .................................................................. 80 6.3.3 Governmental Regulation ...................................................................................... 82 6.3.4 To Verify or Not to Verify: That is a Question ....................................................... 83 6.4 Transforming Professional Norms on Weibo .................................................................... 86 6.4.1 Context Collapse and Relevance of Journalistic Professionalism on Weibo.......... 86 6.4.2 Gatekeeping on Weibo ........................................................................................... 89 6.4.3 Objectivity on Weibo ............................................................................................. 91 6.4.4 Accuracy on Weibo ................................................................................................ 92 7. Discussion and Conclusions........................................................................................................ 96 7.1 Summary of the Results .................................................................................................... 96 7.1.1 Journalistic Practices on Weibo .............................................................................. 96 7.1.2 Negotiation of Journalistic Professionalism on Weibo........................................... 97 7.1.3 Summary ................................................................................................................ 97 7.2 Implications of the Results ................................................................................................ 99 7.2.1 Implications for Journalists and Journalism ........................................................... 99 7.2.2 Freedom of Expression: A Comparison between China and the West ................. 100 7.3 Limitations and Suggestions ........................................................................................... 103 8. References ................................................................................................................................. 104 A P P E N D I X I ......................................................................................................................... 117 Interview Guide ........................................................................................................................... 117 A P P E N D I X I I ....................................................................................................................... 120 An Example of Interview Transcript ......................................................................................... 120 A P P E N D I X I I I ..................................................................................................................... 131

List of Figures

Figure 1: An example of Weibo post using long post function………………………13 Figure 2: Comment thread within Weibo…………………………………….............14 Figure 3: An example of journalist’s Weibo homepage……………………………...18 Figure 4: Blended ethnography and netnography……………………………………35 Figure 5: Profiles of informants……………………………………...........................49 Figure 6: Profile of the participants……………………………………......................63 Figure 7: Relative productivity of the participants…………………………………...67 Figure 8: Summary of posts by the participants……………………………………...68 Figure 9: Proportions of posts with different primary purposes……………………..69 Figure 10: Proportions of posts labeled as job talking and personalizing……………70 Figure 11: An example of journalist’s post about stories behind news report………..75 Figure 12: An example of reference to news reports by screenshot………………….76

1. Introduction 1.1 Journalism in Transition It is without doubt that this is a time of profound change in journalism around the world. As Deuze (2007, 4) claims, “journalism as it is, has come to an end.” A new media ecology which “is social and fluid and trades on connections and collaborative relations” has emerged (Knight and Cook 2013, 1). One important factor contributing to the transition in journalism is the rise of social media. By social media, I refer to the set of Internet-based applications which facilitate creation, consumption, and sharing of user-generated content (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, 61). Social media are different from traditional broadcast mass media in various ways: first, it allows interactions through social sharing; second, it enables one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication in real time; third, it is available to anyone who has access to the Internet; fourth, it encompasses a variety of content formats. Blogs, collaborative projects (such as Wikipedia), content communities (such as YouTube), and social networking sites (such as Facebook) can be regarded as different types of social media. The rise of social media has changed the flows of information fundamentally (Hermida 2010). “People formerly known as the audience” (Rosen 2006) are able to play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information (Bowman and Willis 2003). It is evident that the relationship between the audience and journalists has been rewritten from a one-way, asymmetric model of communication to a more participatory and collective system (Boczkowski 2004; Deuze 2003). Journalists of traditional news organizations are no longer the only providers of news information. The rise of citizen journalism has challenged journalists’ professional identity as the boundaries between news producers and consumers are increasingly blurred (Deuze 2005). Meanwhile, social media have transformed the ways in which journalism is practiced, 1

and they have posed both challenges and opportunities for traditional news organizations. On the one hand, for traditional news organizations facing the pressure of media convergence and challenges of new media, the outlook seem grim. According to a research by Pew Research (2014), the overall revenue for newspapers and magazines in the United Sates has dropped for a third year in a row since 2012. Traditional print media in many other countries have also experienced declining viewing figures and falling sales, and what comes along is the decline in the employment rates of professional journalists in traditional media, especially newspapers and magazines (Pew Research 2014). Thus how to stay relevant and survive in this digital world has become a key issue not only for traditional news organizations, but also for journalists. On the other hand, social media have offered new opportunities for traditional news organizations to attract audiences. Journalists are able to interact with users, to generate stories from users, to promote content, to build community, and to sustain and broaden attention online through social media (Stassen 2010). It is evident that increasingly more journalists have incorporated social media into their routines (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2009). Moreover, many journalists from traditional news organizations have become popular on social media as they have the advantage of professionalism and authority over citizen journalists. And statistics also show that most people still prefer news stories produced by professional journalists (for instance, Reynolds Journalism Institute 2012).

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1.2 Topic of the Thesis: Transforming Journalistic Practices and Norms in Context Collapse As Papacharissi (2009) argues, social media are characterized by their ability to remove, or at least rearrange, the boundaries between public and private spaces, affecting lives not so much through content, but rather “by changing the ‘situational geography’ of social life.” Information posted on social media can be available to a broad audience with no clear boundaries. No matter what your intended audience is, your actual audience can be anyone who has access to the Internet. Marwick and boyd (2011) has used the notion of “context collapse” to describe this phenomena and point out that “social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in fact-to-face conversation”. Thus it is evident that online interactions are now taking place in a space that is “neither distinctly public nor distinctly personal” (Gilpin 2011, 233). While social media, particularly microblogging services such as Twitter and Weibo have become a vital tool for journalists to report events and interact with audiences, the blurring of private and public and the collapsed context have raised a number of practical and ethical issues around professional journalists’ activities on social media platforms. For instance, how do journalists understand the journalistic norms and values and how do they adjust their behavior to fit the context collapse when they disclose and share information on social media? Do they apply a lowest common denominator approach (Hogan 2010), upholding the standards of traditional journalistic professionalism by limiting content to that which will be appropriate for all audience members? To what extent their behavior on social media reflects traditional modes of being a journalist and doing journalism? Does their social media usage represent an extension of professional journalism or an experiment of amateur (or unprofessional) journalism? How will context collapse and its consequences affect journalists’ behavior on social media? How do journalists manage the merger of the 3

private and the public, the personal and the professional on social media? Are core values of journalistic professionalism a major concern when they communicate on social media? What principles guide them when the journalists use social media according to their own personal code? These are important questions to look into because how journalists navigate the context collapse may have significant impact on their journalistic practices and principles on social media. They are also closely related to the question of whether and how traditional news organizations and journalists will survive in the new media environment. As will be shown in the literature later, although there is an emerging field of research that explores the impact of social media on journalism, limited studies have been focused on the journalistic practices and norms in context collapse. While in Western countries, Twitter, one of the major social media platforms, has attracted the most academic attention, there is limited academic research into how Weibo has been used by journalists in China. Therefore, this study aims to fill the gap by investigating Chinese journalists’ Weibo usage and their practices and norms in context collapse.

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1.3 The Different Context in China In some western countries, there are guidelines in some news organizations regarding journalists’ use of social media. Creating multiple accounts for different purposes is one of the strategies for managing context collapse and ameliorating concerns related to the blurring of personal/professional boundaries in the guidelines. For instance, according to Reuters (2013), journalists have to separate their working accounts from their private accounts on Twitter in order to avoid ethical problems. However, in China, there are no such formal rules and most Chinese journalists use only one account on Weibo, which makes the problem of context collapse more significant. Thus it would be very interesting to look at the particular case of journalists’ use of Weibo in China. Moreover, compared to other social contexts, China is very special and interesting because a media system has been established, in which issues of political propaganda, commercialization of the media, and journalistic professionalism collectively affect Chinese journalists’ values and principles (Lu and Pan 2002). Furthermore, the Chinese social context is special because of its coexistence of “dual discourse universes” (He 2009, 44), which characterizes contemporary Chinese society as a dualistic discourse system that distinguishes the official Party universe from the private pluralistic universe. The official discourse universe occupies all the public space of expression, especially the state-controlled mass media, while the private discourse universe survives primarily in the oral space and it is characterized by “nonhegemonic expressions ranging from radical nationalism to liberalism, materialism, and extreme cynicism” (He 2009, 44-45). As new information and communication technologies provide new channels for information dissemination outside government’s conventional control, the private discourse universe has extended its boundaries (He 2009). In particular, the emergence of social media has brought new possibilities for diversified alternative expressions different from traditional official media. On social media, the voice of the individual becomes clearer. 5

For journalists, who are traditionally forced to balance their jobs in the public discourse universe with their personal ideological beliefs (He 2009, 47), they are enabled to use social media as alternative media to express their personal opinions on public issues. Is it possible that journalists will change their public discourse in line with their privately held ideology when they communicate on social media? Will social media allow for more balanced considerations of journalistic professional ideals and political, economic values for Chinese journalists? Or will it deepen the conflicts between journalistic professionalism and political and economic values, because individual journalists may be more aware of what kind of news would be more eye-catching and less politically sensitive, but at the same time not in accordance with traditional values of journalism? Will they stick to traditional professionalism or cater to political and economic values? This is of great importance when studying the Chinese journalists’ practices and norms on social media and it has important implications for the transformation of journalism in China. Although the rapid development of social media in China (especially Weibo) and its impact on journalism have attracted a lot of academic efforts, there are few empirical studies focusing on individual Chinese journalists’ use of social media and their transforming journalistic practices and values. Therefore, this empirical study in the Chinese context sought to explore how Chinese journalists use Weibo and to what extent core values of journalistic professionalism are transformed in context collapse. In doing so it is hoped that this research might contribute to the debate about the impact of social media on journalism more generally, as well as provide insights into the work practices and principles of a new generation of Chinese journalists.

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1.4 Purpose of the Study and Research Questions As mentioned above, since little research has been done, it is important to fill the gap by shedding more light on how Chinese journalists are using social media and how their professional norms and values are transformed in context collapse. This exploratory study attempts to examine Chinese journalists’ performance on Weibo, the most popular social media platform in China, and to explore to how Weibo is reshaping their journalistic values. It also aims at exploring the implications of journalists’ use of Weibo and problems related to journalistic ethics, as well as the potential impact on the future development of media and journalism in China. The research specifically seeks to answer the following questions: RQ1. How do Chinese journalists engage in Weibo practices? Sub-questions include: How are journalists using Weibo? What content do they post on Weibo, and with what frequency? What kind of information or news do they prefer to share? What distinctive patterns and features are emerging? How do they engage with fellow users? Do they act as a gatekeeper when dealing with news and information shared by other users? Do they remain objective when sharing news on Weibo? How is Weibo altering journalists’ traditional practices? What are the factors that influence their performance on Weibo? RQ2. To what extent are core journalistic values transformed on Weibo? Several sub-questions related to the central question include: How does context collapse affect Chinese journalists’ Weibo usage? Is professionalism a major concern when they communicate and interact on Weibo? Do journalistic ethics affect journalists’ activities on Weibo? How are traditional journalistic norms transformed on Weibo? What are the implications of Chinese journalists’ use of Weibo?

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1.5 Significance of the Research This study will provide insight concerning how traditional journalistic practices and norms are transformed by information and communication technologies and what are the implications for the development of journalism and the society. In theory, the study will further our understanding of the changing journalistic norms and values in Chinese context. It is hoped that this study will make a dialogue with similar studies from other international contexts and contribute to the understanding of how social media are reconstructing journalism around the world. In practice, it is helpful for journalists to improve their professional practices and for media organizations and related institutions to make better media policies. In a word, the study will contribute to both theory and practice of journalism. Most of the Chinese journalists using Weibo are aged between 25 and 40. They will be (and some already are) the decision-makers in the Chinese media in the near future. Compared to previous generations of Chinese journalists who are strongly influenced by Maoist politics, this younger generation is more open-minded, liberal thinking, rule breaking, and they share more similarities with their Western counterparts (Dai 2013, 13). Therefore, it is of great importance to explore how this new generation of Chinese journalists deals with their changing professional norms and practices. This study will offer a snapshot account of the current usage of Weibo among Chinese journalists, and further our understanding of the transforming Chinese journalism when both the Chinese media and the Chinese society are at a critical stage of development.

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1.6 Outline of the Research Study This thesis is divided into seven chapters: 1. The introduction, which not only offers a description of the research purpose, but also provides an overview of the study; 2. The background, which provides background information on the development of Weibo and journalism in China; 3. The literature review, which presents an overview of the previous research conducted in the field of online journalism and reviews studies on journalism and Weibo in China; 4. The theoretical framework, which includes norms and values of journalistic professionalism, social media and journalism, and context collapse; 5. The methodology, which discusses the methodological approach of this study and the research design and process; 6. The results and analysis, which presents a thorough analysis of the empirical findings; 7. The discussion and conclusions, which summarizes the findings of the study and discusses the implications of the results.

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2. Background This chapter first reviews the development of social media in China and introduces Weibo, by far the most popular social media platform in China. Some features of Weibo that are different from Twitter are summarized. It also presents a brief introduction to journalism and journalists in China and motivates the choice of journalists in the study.

2.1 The Development of Social Media and Weibo in China The study focuses on one of the most commonly used social media platforms in China, namely Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website. It was launched in August, 2009, by Sina Corporation, the biggest web portal in China, after the government blocked the access to Twitter and Fanfou, the then leading Twitter clone in China in July, 2009 (Yu, Asur and Huberman 2011). There are some other popular social media platforms such as Renren (which is similar to Facebook), but they are less used by journalists. There are four major China-based microblogging services operating under four Internet portal giants: NetEase, Sina, Sohu and Tencent. Sina Weibo is by far the most popular and influential microblogging platform in China. A survey conducted by PR Newswire Asia (2011) found that the most used microblog platform by Chinese reporters is Sina Weibo with 78%, followed by Tencent (24%), Sohu (12.1%) and NetEase (10.1%). On March 27th, 2014, Sina Weibo was officially renamed as “Weibo”. Thus in this study, “Weibo” is used to refer exclusively to Sina Weibo despite the fact that it could also refer to all the China-based microblogging services. According to statistics from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the number of Chinese Internet users was 618 million in December, 2013, which accounted for about 45.8% of the whole population, while the number of Chinese social media users has reached 532 million (CNNIC 2014). It was reported that the total number of Weibo users was 280 million at the end of 2013, which means that 10

more than 45% of the Chinese Internet users are Weibo users (CNNIC 2014). Apart from individual users, central and regional government organizations, media organizations, various companies and institutions and public figures have their own Weibo accounts. As Millward (2012) suggests, Weibo is also a prime source for celebrity sightings and cultural memes. Actor Chen Kun, the most popular celebrity on Weibo, has as many as 72 million followers. As Weibo offers both simplified and traditional Chinese versions as well as an English version, there are also users from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and many other countries and areas. However, the main language of communication on Weibo is Chinese. The main users of Weibo are younger people with higher level of education and relatively high income according to a survey conducted by CNNIC in 2013 (CNNIC 2013). About 65% of Weibo users are less than 30 years old, and most of them are well-educated, with 63% having a university degree or higher (CNNIC 2013). Users include students, white-collar employees, scholars, journalists and so on. Active users discuss issues on Weibo and generate about 100 million posts a day, creating a public sphere where informed users compete to make their voices heard (Bei 2013). Weibo has now become one of the major sources of information, as well as an important channel of information communication for the government, corporations and public figures. According to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Science (Zhang 2011), about 70% of Chinese Weibo users regarded Weibo as a primary source of news in 2011. When breaking news occurs, Weibo is often the first source of information as well as the prime news publishing platform for journalists and media organizations.

2.1.1 The main differences between Weibo and Twitter Weibo is similar to Twitter in many ways. They both enable users to post messages containing up to 140 characters. Users are allowed to mention or talk to other people using “@UserName” format, and to retweet or share posts. Both Weibo and Twitter users can use hashtags with “#HashName#” format to create trends. In addition, there 11

are two types of user accounts on Weibo and Twitter, i.e. verified accounts and normal accounts. However, it is worth mentioning that despite the similarities, there are some important differences between Weibo and Twitter. Compared to Twitter, Weibo offers far more alternatives for tweets, including graphical emoticons, images, videos, topics, long posts, music, voting and so on. Users can even set the time of posting. The long post function allows users to post an article with up to 10,000 characters or photos in the form of image. This makes it convenient for users to share messages containing more than 140 characters in one tweet, as can be seen from the figure below:

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Figure 1 An example of Weibo post using long post function 13

Another important feature of Weibo is that comments to a post can be shown as a list right below the post, which makes it easy for users to read all the comments on the post, just like Facebook posts with an interactive comments section. The commenter can choose whether or not to repost the comment with quoting the whole original post and mentioning the person who has shared the post. The number of times a post has been reposted and commented is also shown below the post. The screenshot below shows a retweeted post with its comments:

Figure 2 Comment thread within Weibo In addition, Weibo has many features and functions similar to Facebook, such as the 14

similar homepage interface, chat and private messages function, various applications, and so on. Moreover, due to the nature of the Chinese language, 140 characters in Chinese can express much more than they do in English. This enables journalists to tell the whole story of a news piece in only one or two posts. For instance, to express “the Chinese premier will be given a rare meeting with Queen Elizabeth when he visits the UK next week, according to Whitehall officials” (135 characters), only less than 40 Chinese characters are needed: “据英国政府官员透露，中国总理李克强下周访问英国时将 罕见地与伊丽莎白女王会晤”. Lastly, the verification policy on Weibo is different from that on Twitter. The verified accounts on Twitter are typically famous people, organizations and so on. Twitter does not accept requests for verification from the general public, while the verification of Weibo accounts is open to general users. Any user who has a clear profile picture, more than 30 following accounts and more than 100 followers can apply for verification of identity on Weibo. There are three kinds of verification on Weibo, including job verification, professional qualification verification, and works or awards verification. For journalists, it is easy to be verified. They can apply for job verification with the name of their affiliated organizations, or for professional qualification verification by uploading a copy of their press cards, or works or awards verification by submitting proof of more than three published works. An orange “V” is added to the username of the verified individual user, which makes it easy to be recognized. The advantage of a verified account is obvious: it is more authoritative and credible as it shows the real identity of the user. In addition, the verified accounts can be shown in the so-called “Hall of Fame” of Weibo, which can make them known to more people. Statistics from People’s Opinion Monitoring Room (2013) show that more than 92,000 media workers have opened verified accounts on Weibo in 2013.

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2.2 Journalism in China Journalists work in news organizations that operate within constraints and opportunities shaped by commercial and institutional factors, including ownership, market share, and a nationally specific relationship between the media and political systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Therefore, it is necessary to introduce the background of the Chinese media system when studying journalists’ norms and practices online. As Chakrabarty (2000) points out, there have been and continue to be historical struggles over different “universals” and “truth regimes” in the world’s media systems, politically, religiously, or culturally inspired. These struggles have shaped the transformation of media and politics. Chinese media system is fundamentally different from the Western media system (Zhang and Su 2012, 9). In line with the economic and social reform, media in China have undergone profound changes. However, influenced by Leninist and Maoist legacies and the struggles against capitalism and Western imperialism, communist universalism still dominates over capitalist liberal universalism in China (Zhao 2012, 150). The Chinese state plays a dominant role in the media system, which is beyond what Hallin and Mancini discussed as “intervention” in terms of ownership, funding and regulation (Zhao 2012, 150). According to Hu Zhengrong (2007), the Chinese media system today is characterized as “single ownership and dual system”, which means that all media in China are public-owned (or state-owned), while in operation, they need to compete and make profit as there are few governmental subsidies. Even though China’s National People’s Congress approved a highly controversial property rights law to consolidate private property relationships in March 2007, the state continues to restrict the privatization of existing media outlets, while peripheral areas of the media and culture industries including entertainment, lifestyle and business areas are opened up to domestic private and foreign capital (Zhao 2012, 153). Consequently, major media outlets are still organizationally affiliated with the 16

government despite the growth of diverse market-driven mass-appeal even liberal-oriented newspapers and expansion of nonparty entities in media production and distribution (Zhao 2012, 154). As Johan Lagerkvist has noticed, since the start of the reform period in 1978, the Chinese media have witnessed a contestation of political power and propaganda on the one hand, and strong-willed people of the commercial creative industries on the other (2009, 371). The extensive commercialization, professionalization and pressures for popular political participation have been affecting the liberalization of the media system (Lagerkvist 2010, 24). In this process, Party journalism has been weakened, while the desire for the professional journalism paradigm of the West has been activated (Pan and Chan 2003). Professional norms such as objectivity, truthfulness and authenticity are increasingly valued in journalism. Meanwhile, Chinese media are also facing intensive economic pressures. Consequently, the role of media has become very complex. Chinese media are the propaganda organs in the first place, the competitor in the market, and then the provider of public service (Hu 2007). Hence, for Chinese journalists, their journalistic values are also complex. As results of a survey on Chinese journalists show, “Chinese literati values coexist with both the modern professional and Party journalism values during the current journalistic professionalization”, and “such coexistence results in complexity in journalists’ attitudes and behavior” (Lin 2010). Another study also suggests that western values of press freedom and independence, “party journalism” (which means that journalism should serve the interest of the party), Chinese traditional literati values (which means that an intellectual should have a strong sense of social responsibility and contribute to the improvement of the country), as well as commercial values (which means that news should appeal to the audience), all influence Chinese journalists’ roles and professional identity (Dai 2013, 14). Chinese journalists’ values are further complicated when they are on social media because of the blurring of the professional and the personal.

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2.3 Choice of Journalists Since this study will focus on traditional journalists (or legacy journalists), it will borrow McQuail’s (2000, 340) old definition of journalism and define journalists as editors and reporters who participate in the gathering, selection and writing processes of informational reports for public media with reference to recent or current events of public relevance. This research focuses on journalists who microblog and choose to make their identities public. Apart from being a verified user, journalists can also choose to publicize their identities by claiming their affiliated news organizations in their profiles, which makes it possible for others to find their accounts by searching the name of the news organization. The picture below is an example of this kind of journalist’s Weibo account:

Figure 3 An example of journalist’s Weibo homepage Therefore, the journalists in this study are Weibo users who either have verified Weibo accounts, or have claimed their affiliated organization in their profiles. Theoretically, journalists from different types of news organizations would present themselves differently on Weibo as they may have different standards in terms of news values and conduct (for instance, tones of presentation). Compared to journalists working with soft news, those working with hard news often have higher standards of conduct. This study mainly focuses on journalists working with hard news, including those reporting news of politics, economics, society, law, etc. Arts, entertainment, 18

lifestyle and sports journalists are not of interest. In China, the development of online media is still in its early stage. Cooperatively and privately owned online media enterprises including popular online news portals, such as Sina, Sohu, Tencent, and NetEase, mainly reproduce and repost news of current affairs from print, wire or broadcast sources. They are not allowed to post original news content according to the Regulations on Internet News and Information Services passed by the Chinese government in 2005. Journalists working for commercial news websites do not have the right to conduct interviews since they are not granted press cards issued by Press and Publications Administration of China. Thus this study mainly focuses on journalists from traditional news organizations. And it needs to be clarified that when talking about “news organizations” in China in the text below, it will mainly refer to mass media news organizations, not including online news organizations. Among the journalists from traditional news organizations, print journalists are more active on social media and they are playing an important role in setting agendas and guiding public opinion. According to statistics from Sina Corporation (2012), the number of verified journalists from newspapers and magazines accounts for over 80% of all the verified journalists’ Weibo accounts. Therefore, this research mainly focuses on journalists from print media. To conclude, the journalists in this study are hard news journalists from mainstream print media who use Weibo with their identities publicized.

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3. Literature review This chapter presents an overview of the field of online journalism. It also reviews studies on journalism and Weibo in China.

3.1 An overview of the field of online journalism Online journalism is an increasingly popular area of research and it has attracted a large number of researches to further our understanding of the past, present and future of journalism. Researchers have been interested in the relationship between social media and journalism, how journalism is changing, and the implications of the changes may have in public and social life. This section will present a review of recent studies on online journalism and highlight what has been learnt so far and what has been neglected. 3.1.1 Technologically Oriented Research An important aspect of study in the field of online journalism is the impacts of technology on online journalism. According to Domingo (2006), the first wave of research on online journalism was dominated by technological determinism. Researchers were optimistic that new features of information and communication technology would foster innovation approaches and thus revolutionize online journalism (Steensten 2011, 312). Hypertext, interactivity, and multimedia are widely accepted as the three new features that have the greatest influence on journalism (Domingo 2006; Paulussen 2004; etc.). Researchers have looked at how these features are linked, what innovative possibilities they have brought to journalism, and to what extent online journalism actually utilizes them (Steensen 2011, 312). Studies found that online journalism is left behind by the technological developments. First, content analysis, survey, and experiment studies found that linear text is still preferred and only hyperlinks to other stories within the online news site are commonly used (Sundar 2009; Quandt 2008; etc.). Secondly, in terms of interactivity, 20

although users are allowed to engage in the content production process, the gate which selects and filters news is not open to them (Fortunati et al. 2005; Domingo et al. 2008; etc.). Lastly, Steensen’s review (2011, 320) finds that multimedia is the least developed among the three features, with journalists struggling to cope with it and users indifferent to it. The gap between the possibilities brought by technology and the actual practices of journalists has driven researchers to consider other forces that influence the development of online journalism and investigate the complexity of news production process.

3.1.2 Online News Production Research In their review of recent studies on online journalism, Mitchelstein and Boczkowski (2009) identify five themes of research on online news production: the history and market environment of online news, the adoption and impact of innovation, the changing journalistic practices, professional and occupational matters of online journalism, and the role of users as content producers. Studies have contributed to our understanding of the tension between the traditional model of news production and the changes brought by information and communication technologies (Bozckowski 2004; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2009). It is found that technology is not an independent factor that influences the development of online journalism. Social and political settings, organizational and institutional context, and market and economic factors are related to the different ways in which technology is adopted (Deuze 2007; Boczkowski 2004). The adoption of innovation has changed the practices of gathering, producing, and publishing news. For instance, journalists can use social media to receive alerts to breaking news, follow high-quality people for information, track trends and public sentiment to inform the news agendas, easily distribute content, get feedback and seek corrections from audiences, and ask for advice through crowdsourcing (Newman 2009; Lewis 2012). For investigative journalists, social media can be used for ongoing reporting of news event and other users will be able to keep updated about the news (Bunz 2010). 21

The changes in news production practices are related to changes in the professional and occupational identity of journalists (Deuze 2005). Three major findings in research on professional and occupational dynamics are: first, the participation of users has posed challenges to the role and functions of journalists as gatekeepers, even though the gate and gatekeeper role is not fully replaced (Domingo 2008, 340); second, the identity of journalism as a profession or occupation and its relevance in the digital era have been questioned (Sousa 2006, 379); third, the self-perceptions of journalists have changed as they re-imagine at least part of their role towards a partnership with consumers in the news production process (Singer 2006, 276). Furthermore, the changing journalistic practices on social media have triggered a debate about whether social media undermine or enhance journalistic practices. Some studies have looked at how blogs, an earlier form of social media, have affected the norms and practices of journalists from mainstream news organizations (Hermida 2009; Singer 2005; etc.). Singer’s (2005) study on journalist bloggers in the United States found that they often expressed opinions in their blogs, which indicated a move away from the neutral stance of the traditional journalist. Scholars have also noticed the tensions around verification, impartiality, and engagement playing out on newer social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Siapera and Veglis 2012). It is evident that Twitter has challenged some established journalistic practices and principles (Lasorsa et al. 2012). Newman (2009) found that prevalent public anger and grievances can undermine objectivity and manipulate journalists’ agenda. Holton and Lewis’s (2011) study on journalists’ Twitter suggested that journalists are becoming more open to sharing opinion, personal expression and humor on Twitter. Despite evidence that Twitter has challenged some established journalistic practices and principles, it is widely accepted that the microblogging platform has incorporated traditional journalistic norms and routines (Lasorsa et al. 2012). Evidence from content analyses suggest that journalists are normalizing Twitter rather than adapting their occupational culture to “a new media format that directly challenges them” (2011, 19). The “normalization of Twitter” occurs through journalists’ tendency to 22

reinforce gatekeeping authority by mentioning, retweeting, and hyperlinking content from other journalists or mainstream media (Lawrence et al. 2013). As Hermida (2012) has pointed out, research into what journalists are saying and doing on microblogging platforms is still in its early stages, and there are still significant gaps in online journalism research. Most research in this area has adopted quantitative approaches, using data gathered from surveys among journalists or content analysis of post on Twitter, with few ethnographic accounts of journalistic practices. More ethnographic and field research may generate novel understandings of the changing journalistic values and practices. Therefore, this study aims to fill the gap and to provide more comprehensive and deeper understanding of journalists’ transforming professional values and practices on microblogging platforms.

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3.2 Review of Studies on Journalism and Weibo in China In recent years, increasingly more Chinese media and communication researchers have become interested in Chinese journalism and social media, particularly Weibo. In China, Weibo facilitates a new public sphere where users of both grassroots and elites can express themselves and make their voices heard. It has become more common for Weibo to set the agenda for traditional journalism, “supplementing and even rivaling professional journalism under government restrictions” (Bei 2013). The crisis of losing the dominant position in news discovering and publishing has to some extent contributed to Chinese journalists’ adoption of Weibo (Zhou 2013). Surveys found that it has become a common practice for journalists to incorporate Weibo into their daily routine (PR Newswire Asia 2011; Zhou 2014). According to a survey conducted by PR Newswire Asia (2011), about two-thirds of the surveyed 2, 503 Chinese journalists used social media to obtain news or conduct interviews in 2010, and approximately half of them have used Weibo frequently. A recent study on Chinese journalists’ use of social media in Shanghai reports that almost all (99.8%) of the interviewed 535 journalists have used Weibo in their journalistic practices in 2014 (Zhou 2014). Moreover, Weibo has revolutionized the traditional way of practicing journalism. Bei (2013) has summarized four changes in professional journalists’ investigative methods after adopting Weibo: receiving news tips via public or private messages; following newsmakers during investigations for news developments and conducting verification; contacting news sources when they prepare for a reporting trip; and disseminating follow-up report of news event and winning more attention and support from the public. It is widely accepted that journalists’ use of Weibo has been playing an increasingly important role in both news reporting and society (Bei 2013). Despite the fact that there is also control and censorship, Weibo has enabled journalists to expose corruption or publish other censorship-challenging stories and successfully get their 24

messages public so as to push the government to settle the problems. Meanwhile, Weibo has been criticized for “lack of objectivity and impartiality, with poor accuracy”, which poses challenges on verification of news information (Zhou 2011). Furthermore, Chinese journalists’ use of Weibo has attracted debates about whether journalistic professionalism should be applied to online expressions (Zheng 2012; Zhang 2012; etc.). The common view is that journalists should always comply with journalistic ethics even online because their Weibo accounts are public (Cheng 2012). However, when it comes to practice, the situation is much more complicated. Since previous research has not examined to what extent core values of journalistic professionalism are transformed on Weibo, this study drawn from empirical materials will fill the gap.

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4. Theoretical Framework The most important theories related to the study will be presented below: firstly, the core journalistic norms and values are presented; secondly, journalism and social media theories are described with emphasis on topics relevant to the research question; lastly, theories on context collapse are discussed, which serve as the guidance of interview questions.

4.1 Journalistic Norms and Values Journalism is defined as a set of cultural practices built on the conviction that its first obligation is to the truth (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2003, 37). As a profession, journalism is based on shared values of professionalism (Ahva 2013, 793). The distinct professional norms and values of journalism affect journalists’ practices, code of ethics, and self-conscious identity, as well as barriers to entry for outsiders (Collins 1990). Although the practice of journalism differs from country to country because of different practicalities and social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, there are certain common professional values that can be found in newsrooms around the world (Callahan 2003). Below are some of the important professional norms that are widely accepted both in Western countries and in China.

4.1.1 Objectivity “The construction of a journalistic identity is built on the bedrock of objectivity.” (Knight and Cook 2013, 106) According to Allan (2010, 23), the most important professional ideal for journalists is objectivity, which means that journalists are supposed to be completely neutral and with a balanced perspective. Although many academics and journalists have problematized the philosophical meaning of “objective journalism” and deny its relevance (for instance, Deuze 2005), objectivity remains a key part of the ideology of journalism in the public discourse (Schudson and Anderson 2008). 26

Calcutt and Hammond (2011) have offered a comprehensive understanding of the idea of objectivity from three aspects: first, objectivity primarily entails a commitment to truthfulness, and implies that journalists should report factually accurate information; second, objectivity implies neutrality in the sense of fairness and balance, and means that journalists should seek to be impartial and unbiased in the process of reporting and present different viewpoints even-handedly when there are conflicting interpretations of an event; third, objectivity also implies neutrality in the sense of emotional detachment, which means that journalists should adopt “a dispassionate approach that separates fact from comment and allows news audiences to make up their minds about events rather than being offered a journalist’s own response” (Calcutt and Hammond 2011, 98). Hence, according to the ideal of objective journalism, journalists are expected to keep their personal opinions to themselves and maintain independence from those they cover.

4.1.2 Gatekeeping Another widely recognized theory about journalistic ideal is gatekeeping. Singer (2005, 178) regards it as a core professional role which is central to journalism’s identity, just as objectivity is described as a core professional norm. The gatekeeping theory was originated from sociology, brought up by Kurt Lewin in 1943. He found that housewives are gatekeepers who control what food enter the “channels” that ultimately bring it from the supermarket into the household. He also realized that this gatekeeping model holds not only for food channels but also for the traveling of a news item through certain communication channels in a group (Lewin 1947, 64). In journalism, gatekeeping is the news production process by which “selections are made in media work, especially decisions whether or not to admit a particular news story to pass through the ‘gates’ of a news medium into the news channels” (McQuail 1994, 213). News stories are often sorted and checked by editors and journalists in newsrooms before distributing to the audience to ensure the quality of the final news product (Gans 2003). In the gatekeeping process, it is apparent that there is some 27

selectivity not only in which and how many news items are transmitted, but also how they are shaped and presented (Shoemaker 1991). Moreover, Shoemaker, Eichholz, Kim and Wrigley (2001, 234) found that the gatekeeping process occurs more than just on individual level, other gatekeeping forces include routines of communication work, organizational characteristics, social institutions, and the social system. Not only professional ethics, but also economic and political factors can influence the gatekeeping mechanism. As the development of Internet has made it easy for anyone to publish their news and views online, the relevance of traditional gate-keepers has drawn the attention from scholars of media and communication. Although the advent of the Internet has brought significant changes to journalists’ gatekeeping role, scholars such as Cassidy (2006) argues that gatekeeping theory is still relevant and is proved to be effective to study online journalists. Studies found that gatekeeping forces on the individual and routine level have influence on the professional role perception of online journalists (Cassidy 2006). Singer (2003) found that online journalists see their gatekeeping role as evolving, rather than disappearing. Observation of political journalists’ blogs in the American context suggests that journalists are “normalize” the new format to fit traditional journalistic norms and continue to perform their gatekeeping function (Singer 2005). Meanwhile, it is found that the definition of gatekeeping has shifted away from story selection towards news judgment, values and practices such as verification to determine the merit of what is disseminated (Singer 2005).

4.1.3 Other Journalistic Norms Other core values of professional journalism are: accountability, which means that journalists should admit mistakes and correct them promptly; transparency, which means that journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods; accuracy (or truthfulness), which means that journalists should be able to say with sincerity that they believe their version of events to be correct when telling it; public service, which means that journalists should provide valuable news and information 28

for the audiences; immediacy, which means that journalists should have a sense of actuality and speed; and autonomy, meaning that journalists should be free and independent in their work (Deuze 2005; Hanitzsch 2007).

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4.2 Social Media and Journalism Social media platforms including blogging and microblogging do not only facilitate citizen journalism, but also have been reshaping the professional process of journalism. As has been shown in the literature review, a growing body of literature has been focusing on the impact of social media on journalistic practices and norms. One important theory is that the news communication online is one of normalization, meaning that journalists generally “normalize” their activities on new media platforms to fit old professional norms and practices. The premise of Singer’s (2005) study of mainstream political journalists’ blogs found that the journalists’ blogs were institutionalized as an extension of traditional journalistic norms and practices. Meanwhile, blogging can encourage journalists to diverge from their traditional professional roles in three ways: 1) deviating from their role as objective information providers by expressing personal opinions, 2) sharing their gatekeeping role by including blogs from others in their blogs, and 3) providing a semblance of accountability and transparency to their professional work by offering their audiences links to external websites which provides background information (Singer 2005, 174).

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4.3 Context Collapse The term “context collapse” was first coined by Michael Wesch (2009). In “YouTube and You: Experiences of self-awareness in the context collapse of the recording webcam”, he defines context collapse as “an infinite number of context collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording”. danah boyd (2011) further develops the concept. According to her (2011, 122), “context collapse” is the phenomenon that social media flatten multiple audiences into one. “Social media collapse diverse social context into one, making it difficult for people to engage in the complex negotiations needed to vary identity presentation, manage impressions, and save face” (Marwick and boyd 2011, 123). Boyd (2011) contends that social media are characterized by a distinct set of affordances, including persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability of information. Persistence means that content created online are automatically recorded and archieved (boyd 2011, 46). Even after deletion, the content may have already spread and may be duplicated and potentially altered by other users. In addition, the content is scalable, which means that it can be potentially shared with large and diverse audiences. Further, the content is searchable, in that users can access it through search. These affordances of networked publics create dynamics to be managed by users, which are invisible audiences (not all audiences are visible when a person is contributing online, nor are they necessarily co-present), collapsed contexts (the lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts), and the blurring of public and private (without control over context, public and private become meaningless binaries, are scaled in new ways, and are difficult to maintain as distinct) (boyd 2011, 49). The context collapse complicates the issue of how the self operates. According to Erving Goffman (1959), we continuously evaluate the situations around us and adjust our behaviors to fit into the situations, consciously or unconsciously. In Goffman’s (1967, 12) terms, there is a process of “face-work”, in which we constantly negotiate 31

the image we portray of ourselves according to situations. In short, how we present ourselves mainly depends on context. When it comes to social media, the context collapses and there is a lack of situational place to orient the individual. For instance, journalists often simultaneously engage with friends, colleagues, other fellow users, each of whom have potentially distinctly different view of who they are and different interactional and performative expectations when they communicate on social media. How to understand the journalistic norms and values how to adjust their behavior to fit the context collapse become important questions for journalists when they disclose and share information on social media, especially when a combination of private and professional use is allowed.

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5. Methodology This chapter first introduces the research strategy of this study, which is a combination of qualitative/quantitative approaches and blended ethnography/ netnography. Then it explains the research design and process. Online participant observation and semi-structured interviews are the main methods of collecting data. This is followed by an explanation of the data analysis methods. In the end, related ethical issues are discussed.

5.1 Research Strategy According to Silverman (2009, 110), methodology refers to the choices researchers make about cases to study, methods of collecting the required data, the analysis strategy, and the application of research. The kinds of knowledge a research aims to reveal determines the choice of methods or research strategy (Mason and Dale 2011, 1).

5.1.1 A Combination of Qualitative and Quantitative Research In social sciences, methodologies can be broadly defined as qualitative or quantitative. According to Denzin and Lincoln (2000, 4-5), “qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.” By contrast, quantitative researchers are distanced observers from outside who pass judgment on participants (Creswell 1998, 18). The aim of this study is to investigate how mainstream journalists engage in Weibo practices and to explore how norms and values of journalistic professionalism are transformed on Weibo. Therefore, the main form of research question is how (describing what is going on), which means that getting out to the field, gaining access, gathering material and making interpretations are needed. Thus the nature of the research question calls for the use of qualitative methods. Meanwhile, to judge 33

whether and measure to what extent professional norms and values are transformed on Weibo, quantitative method of content analysis is appropriate. Therefore, this study has integrated qualitative and quantitative approaches to reap their respective strengths.

5.1.2 Blended Ethnography/ Netnography This study adopts a blended ethnography and netnography to explore how Chinese journalists balance between the professional and the personal on Weibo and how they negotiate their professional norms. Ethnography is “the art and science of describing a group or culture” (Fetterman 1989, 11). It relies on first-hand experiences and its combination of participant observation and interviews allows the researcher to go beyond relying solely on interview accounts (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009, 171). In recent years, there has emerged a separate term for ethnography conducted online, namely, “netnography”, which “has its own uniquely adapted set of practices and procedures that set it apart from the conduct of face-to-face ethnography” (Kozinets 2009, 60). According to Kozinets (2009, 65), netnography is conducted using data generated from online or other ICT-related interactions such as online interview, online participation, online observation and download, etc., while ethnography is conducted using data collected by face-to-face interactions and their transcription in field-notes, with no data from online interactions.

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Figure 4 Blended ethnography and netnography (Reproduced based on Kozinets 2009, 67) Considering that the objects of this study are Chinese journalists who use Weibo, the context of it is not just the online community, but the larger social world. Since journalists’ self-presentation online is closely related to their social situations offline and demographic characteristics, it is impossible to gain a complete picture through pure netnography. It would be more fruitful to adopt a blended ethnography and netnography, a combination of approaches which involves both online and face-to-face cultural interaction and data collection. Specifically, online participant observation and content analysis of the content Chinese journalists post on Weibo can be used to investigate how they present themselves on Weibo, and semi-structured in-depth interviews offline can be used to explore how they negotiate their professional values and norms online. This will be further discussed in detail later. In summary, the selection of qualitative methods and a blended ethnography/ 35

netnography research strategy is based on the research questions of the study. The next section will present the research design and process, which are guided by the research strategy.

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5.2 Research Design and Process This section will explain how the research was designed and the motivation of the choice. It will also illustrate how the research was carried out in detail. Online observation and semi-structured interviews are the main methods to collect data.

5.2.1 Online Participant Observations Online participant observation was carried out from December 2013 to April 2014. The observation was mainly focusing on Weibo and at least four hours were spent on it every week. Tencent Weibo was also observed, but only for a week in March 2014. Field notes were taken and screenshots were collected. The profiles of participants were examined and collected in order to learn more about their professional/personal balance on Weibo. For example, each participant’s avatar, user name, verification status, self-description, friends list, followers and so on were collected. Participant Observation and Online Participant Observation Participant observation characterizes most ethnographic research (Fetterman 2009, 37). Participant observation is a qualitative technique that provides the opportunity for researchers to become involved in a social group they are studying and observe people in real-life situations to learn about the group and its culture (Berger 2011, 189). In this way, researchers can participate in the lives of people under study while keeping a professional distance that allows adequate observation and recording of data (Fetterman 2009, 37). Traditional participant observation is conducted in the “offline” world. However, what if the phenomenon of interest is primarily or even solely exists online? Garcia and some other scholars suggest that the participant observation approach must be adjusted when working in online settings (2009, 57). They have several reasons for this: first, as the researchers cannot observe the people they study, the nature of observation changes; second, the role of field notes and how findings are reported have changed since the Internet has enabled a new way of recording and interaction; 37

third, the nature of online data (textual and visual material) is different from that of offline data (people speaking and acting), thus a different set of skills for understanding and analysis is required (Garcia et al. 2009, 57-58). As the phenomenon of interest in this study is journalists’ professional/personal balance on Weibo, which only exists online, online participation is more suitable than participant observation. Online Participation Observation Process 1. Gain access to the field. Weibo is the main field of observation in this study. At least half an hour was spent on it every day. I started to use Weibo in April, 2010, after a famous journalist recommended it. And I have been an active user since then. Now I follow 220 accounts and I am followed by 294 accounts on Weibo. 2. Identify observation objects. Before the study, I followed 200 accounts on Weibo, among which about one tenth are journalists or other media workers. And most of the journalists I followed are verified, highly professional, experienced, very active, and have a great influence on Weibo. I was aware that my experience on Weibo would affect the participant observation because the kind of journalists and how many of them I follow determines who and what I can observe. Consequently, I did not limit my observation to people I had followed and added other journalists to my following list. It was expected that the journalists should cover different backgrounds (gender, education, affiliated organization, etc.) and different Weibo usage (verification status, activeness, number of followers, and so on). The diversity of the journalists ensures that the findings from participant observation would be able to reveal the different aspects of the issues in question. 3. Determine the role of the researcher. According to Berger (2011, 190), participant observation is typically carried out by 38

researchers in one of the two roles: participant as observer (the researchers participate with the group being observed as a functioning part of the group) and observer as participant (the researchers are neutral observers from the outside and participate for the purpose of making observations and recording them). In this study, the researcher has taken the role of observer as participant and tried to keep a balance between familiarity and neutrality. 4. Preliminary observation. In the first phase of online participant observation, my focus included: 1) The affordance of Weibo for self-presentation. I observed what is allowed to do on Weibo, and how users can personalize their profiles and settings differently. 2) The social use of Weibo. This part of the observation focused on the interaction between users. For instance, how functions such as repost, comment, thumb up, follow, and so on are used by users. 3) Journalists’ use of Weibo online. This part of the observation focused on the behaviors of journalists on Weibo, including how they deal with their profiles, what kind of news and information they share, what topics they are following, whether they post their personal opinions, what kind of language they use, how they interact with other journalists or users, how they use hashtags, how they react to the hot topics on Weibo, and so on. I did not only observe the journalists I followed, but also visited the pages of some strangers who commented on the posts of the journalists. I looked at who they are and added them to my following list for further observation if they are also journalists and can be potential interviewees. Both descriptive notes and reflective notes were taken. 5. Formal participant observation. After the preliminary observation, eight journalists were sampled to be both participants and interviewees, and the specific sampling tactics and methods will be explained in detail in the semi-structured interviews section. I followed all the eight 39

journalists on Weibo before the interviews in order to observe their activities and formulate interview questions according to their different situations. The formal participant observation involved an examination of the profiles of the participants, follow-up observation of their activities during and after several major events, and a review of their Weibo pages. The data collection in this process will be illustrated in detail in the next section. Data Collection during Online Participation Observation As Garcia and other scholars (2009, 61) argue, technologically-mediated environments have profoundly changed the nature of data obtained through participant observation. Observation in online research involves reading text and watching images or videos on a computer screen rather than watching people in the real world, hence it can be completely unobtrusive (Garcia et al. 2009, 58). The data collected in online participant observation are a mixture of textual, visual or aural data (Garcia et al. 2009, 53). Moreover, the data can be easily recorded. As Lomborg (2012, 220) suggests, web archiving is a particularly useful method in studies of users’ communicative practices. It is very convenient for researchers to collect data by simply copying and saving the information or taking screenshots. In addition, the data can provide information not only about participants’ present activities but also about what has happened in the past because users’ actions online can be retrieved. As a microblogging platform, Weibo provides rich data which are public by default (unless special personal settings affect the extent and the type of data actually accessible to researchers). The textual data available for the participant observation in this study includes posts and comments of the journalists, which convey important information about their professional/personal balance. Visual data includes the journalists’ profile pictures, backgrounds for the homepages, layout of the homepages, and other aspects of the visual appearance in terms of how messages are conveyed. While online participant observation can provide a great amount of data, it has also brought a great challenge to researchers, which is how to search, filter and collect the 40

most relevant data for the research since it is difficult to record every important page visited. For this study, the data collection has combined traditional field notes and selective archiving strategy. As mentioned before, eight journalists were sampled to be online participants. Selective archiving strategy was used to capture frequent updates and to make full records of interaction on the sample journalists’ profiles, tweets, and activities over two time periods in order to form the empirical basis for content analysis. The online observation and content sampling of the eight journalists were conducted in two waves: one from 1st to 30th of March, 2014, and the other from 1st to 30th of April, 2014. Each wave involved 30-day online observation and sampling the content of the first 5 tweets the journalists posted each day, starting at 12 a.m. and ending at 11:59 p.m. If a journalist posted fewer than 5 posts on a given day, those that they did post were recorded. The primary reason of recording only the first 5 posts per day is to conserve resources and keep those particularly active journalists from overly influencing the results. The sampled contents were copied and saved with screenshots in pdf files, and an excel document was created to keep track of the data. The data collected in the first wave were used to make preliminary ethnographic content analysis. And data collected in the second wave were used for comparison and contrast.

5.2.2 Semi-structured Interviews Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Beijing, China, between February and March, 2014, and in Stockholm, Sweden, between March and April, 2014. Eight Chinese journalists working in the print media with different backgrounds and different Weibo usage were interviewed to ensure the diversity of participants. The profiles of the eight participants will be presented in detail in the sampling section. Four of the interviews were conducted through face-to-face conversations in Beijing. And the remaining four were conducted in Stockholm either by phone or QQ, a Chinese instant messaging software which can make voice calls. Follow-up 41

complementary interviews were done in Stockholm either via QQ voice calls or through written messages on Weibo. The audio conversations were recorded and transcribed. All the written conversations were documented for further analysis. The following section will introduce the concept of semi-structured interviews and then explain why this method is adopted in this study. This will be followed by a detailed description of the interview process. Method of Semi-structured Interviews Semi-structured interview or depth interview is an open-ended conversation between a researcher and an informant which explores an individual’s world view or some aspects of it (Priest 2010, 17). It is regarded as the second key method used by ethnographers and other qualitative researchers (Priest 2010, 17). Compared to observation, semi-structured interview can get the story from the individuals’ own perspective and provide more details of what is going on and how they think. However, as Berger has pointed out, there are some weaknesses of adopting interviews: 1. People don’t always tell the truth; 2. People don’t always remember things accurately; 3. People don’t always have useful information; 4. People sometimes tell you that they think you want to hear; 5. People use language in different ways (2011, 149-150). Therefore, it is reasonable for this study to combine participant observation and semi-structured interview in order to mitigate the weaknesses of each method and to gain a better overview of how Chinese journalists deal with the issue of professional/personal balance on Weibo and how they negotiate their professional norms and practices. Unlike structured interview or survey questionnaire, semi-structured interview does not have a rigidly preset structure, although the interviewer may rely on a list of topics or general questions as a guide (Priest 2010, 17). For this reason, this type of interview allows the emergence of unforeseen findings and uncertain things that the researcher may have not considered before but may also provide important information for the study. As this is an exploratory study, there is limited information 42

from previous studies, which means that the researcher has less positioned knowledge about the topic. Thus semi-structured interview enables the researcher to be open to new research directions emerging from the interview and come up with more interview questions relevant to the topic. Although a list of questions was prepared at first for this study in order to make the interview focus on the main themes, as the semi-structured interviews went on and some new findings related to the topic emerged, the interview questions were simultaneously adjusted. This is also the reason why follow-up interviews were conducted. The next section will present the interview protocol. Interview Protocol The main purpose of this study is to explore how Chinese journalists engage in Weibo practices and how they negotiate their professional norms and values. Based on the research questions, relevant theories and online observation, five interview themes were identified and a list of questions was created as described below: 1. Demographic information, including age, educational background and working experience. 2. General social medai use. This part attempts to reveal how the participants use social media and their motivations behind it. It aims to gain an overview of the participants’ social media usage habits, motivation and experience. Sample questions are: What other social media do you use except Weibo? Why did you start using them? How much time do you spend on them? Can you describe how do you use social media on a typical day? 3. Use of Weibo. This part mainly explores how the participants present themselves on Weibo, including how they deal with their profile, their activities of content creation, information dissemination, interaction with other users, and the reasons behind them. Sample questions in this part include: Do you use true avatar and real name on Weibo? Why or why not? Are you a verified user? If so, when and why do you choose to be one? If not, why not and have you considered applying for 43

verification? What news and information do you often post on Weibo? Do you share your personal life on Weibo? How often? Do you think that would influence your image of professional journalist? What kind of content do you repost? What kind of news and information do you retweet more? Do you comment on news when retweeting? When commenting, how personal are you? Do you discuss about news events very often on Weibo? With whom? Some probing questions were also prepared to draw in-depth responses from the interviewees. 4. Management of context collapse. The task of this part is to reveal how the participants deal with the issue of context collapse. Sample questions include: Can you clearly distinguish personal conduct from professional conduct on Weibo?Do you think there is a need to separate work account from personal account?Are your activities on Weibo related to your affiliated organization? If so, how? If not, why not? Do you comply with journalistic professionalism when you communicate and interact on Weibo? Would you consider journalistic ethics? How often? Why? 5. Transforming journalistic practices and norms on Weibo. This part focuses on to what extent professional norms and practices of journalism are transformed on Weibo. Sample questions are: Would you consider journalistic ethics when using Weibo? How often? Why? Do you think it is OK for a journalist to be very personal and emotional on Weibo since it is a platform which allows for diversified expression or do you think it is problematic? Do you think you are responsible for the truthfulness of the news when you repost it? Why or why not? Do you think journalists should comply with all the traditional professional norms on Weibo? Why? What ethics do you value most? Sampling According to Neuman (2011, 219), a sample is “a smaller set of cases a researcher select from a large pool and generalizes to the population”. For Becker (1998, 96), sampling is a major problem for any kind of research because researchers often need to find out something that can be applied to everything of a certain kind by studying 44

just a limited number of cases. The researchers need the sample to persuade people that their results can be applied to the population (Becker 1998, 96). In other words, sampling plays an important role in determining whether the study results are valid and to what extent they can be applied to the population. Purposive sampling is selected as the sampling strategy in this study. Purposive sampling is defined by Neuman (2011, 267) as “a non-random sample in which the researcher uses a wide range of methods to locate all possible cases of a highly specific and difficult to reach population”. It is used when the researcher has a specific purpose in mind and aims to select samples that are deemed likely to answer the research questions. According to Fetterman (2009, 35), purposive sampling is the most common sampling technique for ethnographic studies. Purposive sampling is suitable for this study for the following reasons: first of all, the study aims to identify a particular pre-determined type of journalists, namely journalists working in print media who microblog with their identities publicized, for in-depth investigation; second, this study does not aim to find out something that can be generalized to the entire population, but attempt to provide knowledge to reveal the different features and dimensions of journalists’ use of Weibo and essential aspects in their negotiation of professional norms and practices, thus it does not require a random or representative sample. According to the aim of the study, the sample should be able to reveal the expected diversified dimensions. Specifically, the sample should cover journalists who act professionally to different extents on Weibo. In addition, the journalists’ social attributes (age, gender, education) and occupational features (affiliated organization, position, specialization) should be taken into consideration to make sure that the sample can represent the diversity or complexity of the phenomenon in question. Moreover, based on participant observation, journalists with different frequencies of tweeting, different number of followers and different verification statuses tend to present themselves in different ways on Weibo. For this reason, it is important to make sure that the sample includes both journalists who are verified and not verified 45

on Weibo, and journalists with different frequencies of posting and different number of followers. To conclude, this study has adopted purposive sampling for the reason that it enables the researcher to select specific cases from different backgrounds and usage of Weibo in order to achieve the purpose of the study. It is worth mentioning that although ideally all possible cases should be included, this study did not fulfill this due to the fact it is impossible to continually sample cases until reaching saturation point in the limited time for a master thesis. However, the study has attempted to cover major types of cases to make the samples as diversified as possible. The sampling procedure in this study includes two steps which borrow from Alvesson and Sköldberg’s (2009, 27-28) theoretical sampling tactics: first, the differences between the groups are minimized, and then they are maximized. 1. Minimize the differences As mentioned above, this study aims to identify a particular pre-determined type of journalists, namely journalists working in print media who microblog with their identities publicized, for in-depth investigation. Thus there are several criteria for the selection of samples. First of all, the samples should be journalists working in print media who microblog with their identities publicized. As mentioned above, the journalists this study is interested in are: a) verified Weibo users with their identities public; b) normal Weibo users who claim the organizations they belong to in the profile. Second, as Beijing is the political and cultural center of China and the headquarters of a larger number of media organizations are set in it, it is appropriate to limit journalists in this area. This choice is also supported by the statistics that nearly half of the 400 most influential Chinese journalists on Weibo are in Beijing and that verified journalists in Beijing accounts for more than a quarter of all the verified 46

journalists in China (People’s Opinion Monitoring Room 2013). To obtain lists of journalists who work in print media, there are two options: The first is to go to the “Hall of Fame” of Weibo and find lists of all the journalists working in magazines and newspapers from category a), i.e., verified Weibo users. According to the lists provided on Weibo, there are 629 and 594 verified journalists working in Beijing based magazines and newspapers respectively. The strength of this choice is that it would be helpful to sample different types of journalists, while its obvious weakness is that it does not include journalists from category b), namely journalists who are not verified but have made their identities publicized. The other option of obtaining lists of journalists is to select representative traditional mainstream news organizations, and then a list of journalists from category a) and b) can be found by searching the name of the organization in the Weibo search engine. Preliminary choices of representative mainstream newspapers and magazines are People’s Daily, Beijing News, China News Weekly, and Phoenix Weekly, which are popular and widely recognized in Beijing or even nationally. The weakness of this choice is that it might rule out many specialized journalists. This study has combined the two different ways to identify journalists working in Beijing based print media who use Weibo and choose to make their identities public. The second criterion for selection of the samples is that the journalists studied should be active users of Weibo. The threshold is that the journalist should tweet at least once per day on average. The third criterion is that the journalists selected should be those working with hard news, while arts, entertainment, lifestyle and sports journalists are not of interest in this study as has stated earlier. To summarize, after minimizing the differences, the samples have been narrowed down to hard news journalists working in Beijing based newspapers or magazines who tweet at least once a day on average on Weibo and are either verified or have 47

claimed their affiliated organizations in their profiles. 2. Maximize the differences This step is intended to maximize the differences among the samples. As stated above, to make sure that the samples can represent the diversity or complexity of the phenomenon in question, journalists with different social attributes (age, gender, education), occupational features (affiliated organization, position, specialization), Weibo usage and influence (frequencies of tweeting, number of followers and verification status) should be covered. With these specific purposes in mind, a set of sampling tactics was employed to select interviewees from the already narrowed down subjects in the first step. The first method was to contact the potential interviewees directly via private messages on Weibo. Messages with a brief introduction of the research and an explanation of the interview were sent to eight journalists from newspapers and eight from magazines through Weibo in February. However, the response rate was quite low. Only six of the contacted journalists replied and three of them refused to be interviewed because they were too busy. The remaining three journalists agreed the request of interview and were interviewed face-to-face in Beijing in February and March. Considering that the success rate of getting in touch with interviewees by Weibo messages was quite low and to be more pragmatic, a second sampling tactic was employed by locating interviewees via friends. Two different methods were used: the first was to check on my connection lists of friends who are journalists and see if they are suitable interviewees; the other was to ask friends whether there are any journalists on their friend lists or they know any potential interviewees no matter whether they actually know them or not in real life. This sampling tactic is to some extent similar to convenience sampling. However, there is a major difference between the two: in this sampling, the potential interviewees were judged and selected to make sure that all the cases satisfy the specific sampling purposes of the study. Five interviewees were sampled in this way and were interviewed in March. 48

The profiles of the informants are shown in the chart below: Name

Working

Gender

years

Xing

University

Organization

Specialization

major

12

Male

Spanish

method

Southern Metropolis

Investigative

Daily (Beijing)

Liang

12

Male

Economics

Sampling

China Youth Daily

Via Weibo search engine

Investigative

Via Weibo “Hall of Fame”

Qing

9

Male

English and

China Newsweek

Investigative

Journalism

Yu

6

Male

Publishing

Via Weibo search engine

Phoenix Weekly

General

Recommended by a friend

Hui

3

Male

Communication

Honesty Outlook

Political

Via one of my follows

Jin

2

Female

Law

Beijing Times

Political

Recommended by a friend

Yuan

3

Female

Communication

Beijing News

Political

Via one of my follows

Si

4

Female

Journalism

CBN Weekly

Economic

Recommended by a friend

Figure 5 Profiles of informants (Note: The names of the participants are pseudonyms in order to guarantee their anonymity.) Interview Process 1. Preparation for the interview.

49

When contacting the interviewees, an introduction to the research and an explanation of the interview were made in Chinese. An outline of the interview was also sent to the interviewees in advance so that they could be better prepared. 2. Clarification of the interview and issues related to privacy and rights. The interview began with a brief introduction to the research and explanation of the interview just in case they did not read the material sent to them or they were confused or misunderstood the topic. Then they were informed about issues related to privacy and rights. They were reassured that they would be anonymized in the thesis, other publications or public presentations. They were also asked to grant permission to access their Weibo pages to observe their usage and to collect the necessary data. The following clarification was made: some of the interview questions can be answered by studying their Weibo content, however, they will still be asked so that the answers can be compared with the results from the analysis of their Weibo content. 3. Introduction of the interview process. The interviewees were informed about the five themes of the interview and what would happen during the next forty-five minutes so that they would be aware of what was going on and feel less nervous. They were also asked if they mind recording the interview. This process was expected to make the interviewees feel respected. 4. Interviewing. The interviewees were first asked whether they were ready. This was important especially when the interview was conducted online using audio software to make sure that the connection was good and that the interviewee was ready to talk. Then the interview was conducted. Questions were clarified when sensing that the interviewees did not fully understand. All of the face-to-face and audio interviews were recorded as agreed by the interviewees. 5. Follow-up complementary interview. Follow-up interviews were done via QQ voice calls or though written messages on 50

Weibo. The audio conversations were recorded. All the written conversations were saved in separate documents. It is worth mentioning that although face-to-face interview is more desirable, four interviews were conducted in audio conversations and all the follow-up complementary interviews were conducted in audio or written conversations due to practical reasons. As there were many major events in China in March, the journalists were either too busy to meet or out for interview tasks. As for the follow-up interviews, the choice of audio and written conversation interview was because of geographic distance. Compared to audio interviews and written message interviews, face-to-face interviews can provide much more information about the interviewees and their reactions because the communication is not limited to language. Facial expressions and body language are very important for the researcher to understand what the interviewees really mean. Likewise, through eye contact, the interviewees can know that the researcher is listening carefully and cares about what they are saying. By contrast, in phone or online audio interviews, it is more difficult for both the researcher and interviewees to get feedback from each other. The researcher needs to listen carefully to the tone of the interviewees to figure out what they are actually saying and have a sense of what they could have said but did not say, so that follow-up questions can be asked. The researcher should also say “yeah” or “I see” often to let the interviewees know that they are listened and understood. From my perspective, written text interview was the least desirable way of interview despite the fact that it does have certain advantages over the other two forms of interview (for instance, the interviewees may have more time to think and express themselves in a more exact way). Two follow-up interviews were done this way because one interviewee did not have a speaker on her computer and it was not convenient for the other interviewee to do an audio interview at that time. The weaknesses of written text interview were significant. Since the researcher could not see the facial expressions or body language of the interviewees or even listen to their 51

tones, it was difficult to know whether the interviewees were focusing on the interview or not. Moreover, the interviews took much more time than the normal ones as the written conversation was less spontaneous. In addition, the interviewees could change or delete the content they have already written which might reflect their true thoughts while the research would never know about that. The most significant negative effect of written text interview was that the interviewees tended to give briefer answers even though they had much more time to think and formulize their ideas. Thus the researcher had to ask many follow-up questions so that the interviewees could give more specific explanations. However, sometimes asking more questions did not work so well as the interviewees did not have the patience to type many words. Therefore, written text interview is the least favorable form of interview for me. To conclude, my experience is that face-to-face interview is the most preferable choice. If it is not on the option list, then phone interview or online audio interview is more suitable. Researchers should be very careful when conducting interviews through written conversation.

5.2.3 Data Analysis Strategies The data for this study mainly came from the content of participants’ Weibo posts, field notes, and transcripts of in-depth interviews. Content analysis was used to analyze the content journalists publish on Weibo and the field notes. Creswell’s coding strategy was used to analyze the data from the interviews. Content Analysis and Operationalization To answer the research questions, the content analysis looked at how journalists are using Weibo, what content they are sharing on Weibo, and with what frequency, how personal they are, and to what extent they reflect traditional modes of being a journalist and doing journalism. For this study, the tweet is the unit of content analysis. The data was conceptually coded with both numerical and descriptive information. 52

Preliminary analysis was based on both previous theories from Singer (2005) and Lasorsa et al. (2011) and results from online observation and interview. 1) Objectivity To examine to what extent journalists use Weibo to express personal opinions thus deviate from their role as objective information providers, each post was coded for its primary purpose, whether to convey opinion. According to Lasorsa, Lewis and Holton (2011), the primary purposes and dominant content of journalists on Twitter was identified as to convey information, to seek information or to offer opinion, which can also be applied to journalists’ Weibo content. Based on results from online observation and interview, this study has identified another purpose of the content of journalists on Weibo, which is to gather opinion. Posts that primarily offered opinion were labeled as “major opinion”. For example, the following post would be regarded as major opinion: “There are a lot of problems with the news article on Guo Meimei from People’s Daily, for instance, the description such as ‘addicted to gambling by nature’ was far from rigorous.” These posts were also coded whether they contain obvious emotional expressions or not. In addition, posts primarily conveying information were coded whether they contained an element of opinion, and if so, they would be labeled as “minor opinion”. For instance, the following post would be labeled as minor opinion: “Interviewing Fang Zhouzi this afternoon. Hope he says something newsworthy.” 2) Gatekeeping To examine to what extent journalists share their gatekeeping role by including posts from others in their Weibo posts, each post was coded for whether or not it was a retweet. Retweeting is a post which contains the original message of another user, thus can be viewed as an indication of journalists’ “opening the gates” to allow others to participate in the news production process. Retweets were further coded whether they include comment on the original post or not. Retweeting without comment usually comes with the format of “Repost@username original message”, while the format of 53

retweeting with comment is “comment@username original message”. In addition, original sources of the retweets were recorded. 3) Accountability and Transparency To examine to what extent journalists provide accountability and transparency in their Weibo posts, each post was examined whether it was related to information about their job. Posts conveying information were coded into two categories: job talking and personalizing. “Job talking” is information that is primarily about a journalist’s work, such as sharing news in his or her reporting area, publicizing a story the journalist produced or other stories from the journalist’s news organization, and so on. It was further coded with the subcategory of whether or not referring to affiliated organization. Personalizing includes messages about journalist’s personal everyday life and other information that is not related to work, such as what music one is listening to, what one has for dinner, news of entertainment, etc. A second element of Weibo post that might contribute to accountability and transparency includes posts seeking information and posts gathering opinion. Posts seeking information are those asking for responses about certain topics directly. For example, when an incident such as a car accident happens, journalists might send messages asking who is on the scene or knows any details about it. Posts gathering opinion are those asking what other users think about a certain issue. An example of this is “Why is The Paper so powerful? Any thoughts about it?” Another indicator of accountability and transparency is whether the post involves a discussion between the journalist and other Weibo users. Discussing usually implies a conversation, and includes messages directed at another user with the format of “text@anotheruser”. In discussions, journalists may answer questions about their work, thus may strengthen accountability and transparency. In addition, linking is also an indicator of accountability and transparency. Since a single post may not be able to tell the whole news story or contain all the information, it sometimes comes with hyperlinks to refer to more information. All the posts were 54

coded with or without links. For posts with links, the linking sites were identified. Finally, all posts were coded for their topics, such as politics and civic affairs, economy and business, entertainment and arts, etc. Analysis of Interviews To analyze transcripts of interviews in order to explore to what extent there is a negotiation of professional norms for Chinese journalists on Weibo, Creswell’s (2009) analysis tactics and coding strategy was applied. The general guide for data analysis procedures brought up by Creswell (2009) is as follows: 1. Organize and prepare the data for analysis; 2. Read through all the data and get a general sense of the information and reflect on the overall meaning; 3. Begin detailed analysis with a coding process; 4. Generate a description of the setting or people and identify themes from the coding; 5. Represent the data; 6. Interpret the larger meaning of the data. Creswell (2009) also proposed a guide for the coding process: 1. Read all the transcripts carefully and get a sense of the whole; 2. Pick one transcript, go through it and identify the relevant topics; 3. Do this for several transcripts and make a full list of topics; 4. Cluster together similar topics, abbreviate each topic and go back to the transcripts and see if new categories and codes emerge. 5. Turn the topics into categories, and see if there are interrelationships between the categories. 6. Make a final decision on the abbreviation for each category and alphabetize these codes. 7. Assemble the data material belonging to each category in one place and perform a preliminary analysis. 8. Check if the coding can be refined. Triangulation According to Fetterman (2009, 94), triangulation is crucial to the validity of ethnographic research, testing one source of information against another to strip away alternative explanations and attempt to prove a hypothesis. The results from the analysis of interviews were compared and contrasted with the 55

results from the content analysis in order to find the relations between the journalists’ practices on Weibo and their professional values. In this way, the study avoids the drawback of pure self-reported data, and it is able to identify the mismatch between what journalists say they do and their actual behavior.

56

5.3 Ethical Considerations Researchers may face many ethical problems that surface during data collection in the field, and in the analysis and dissemination of reports (Creswell 1994, 141). According to Creswell (1994, 19-20), the main ethical issues researchers should consider are: seeking consent, avoiding the conundrum of deception, maintaining confidentiality, and protecting the anonymity of participants.

5.3.1 An Ethical Dilemma in Online Participant Observation When conducting participant observation, the researchers have to decide whether to conceal their observations from the group they are studying. If the studied group is told that they are studied, they may change their behavior. However, if the researcher chooses not to tell the group about the observation, it may raise ethical issues. The common view is that in traditional participant observation, the researchers should clearly introduce themselves and inform the participants about the aim of the study without deception. However, the issue is more complicated when the observation is online. I was confronted with an ethical dilemma in the online participant observation. Since I used my own Weibo account which already exists to conduct the field study, I have a dual identity on Weibo: both a researcher and a common user. As a researcher, I should clearly show my identity to the studied group at the beginning of the participant observation. However, for several reasons, I did not inform everyone about my identity. The first reason is related to the concept of “group” in this study. Unlike the group in traditional participant observation which is a group of people who stay together in the physical world, the group in online participant observation usually does not have a common place to stay in the real world. In this study, the group of people studied is Chinese journalists who microblog. They are distributed like nodes on the net, and they do not even have an online group. Thus the group in this study is different from the group in a traditional sense, which raises the question of where and to whom shall 57

I introduce myself and inform the purpose of the study. In addition, as the observation in the first phase involves a large number of participants, it is very difficult to inform everyone and there is no efficient way to do so. Based on the above reasons and considering the fact that the focus of my online participant observation was on the sampled eight journalists, I think it was not necessary to inform the many other journalists I observed in the first phase of observation. I have asked the eight participants in the formal online observation for permission to observe them and collect their data on Weibo. And several measures were taken to ensure their right of privacy in the research.

5.3.2 Data Collection on Social Media Platforms Although large amounts of data are public on social media platforms, it does not necessarily mean that we can collect and use them freely. As Zimmer (2010, 324) argued in “But the data is already public: on the ethics of research in Facebook”, while social media platforms have enabled researchers to access rich free data, it is our responsibility to ensure our research methods and process remain rooted in longstanding ethical practices. Concerns over consent, privacy and anonymity become even more important. To protect research participants, the data from Weibo were collected with the permission of the journalists being studied, and I also asked for consent to use the data.

5.3.3 Respect and Privacy in Interviews It is very important that a researcher is polite and respects the privacy of interviewees before, during and after the interviews. As mentioned earlier, when contacting the potential participants, I sent them private messages introducing myself and the research as an interview request through Weibo. By doing so, I showed my respect to their personal online space. For the ones who agreed to be interviewed, I often tried to 58

find the time and place most convenient for them to be interviewed. And for those who refused the interview request, I replied thanks as well. To ensure the privacy and dignity of the interviewees, they were asked if they had any questions about privacy issues before the interviews, and they were informed about the purpose of the research and their rights regarding privacy.

59

6. Results and Analysis This chapter begins with a brief overview of the use of Weibo by Chinese journalists. Then, the different aspects of the transforming journalistic practices and norms are shown in detail.

6.1 Use of Weibo To understand how Chinese journalists’ practices and norms are transformed on Weibo, it is necessary to first look at how they use Weibo on a daily basis. Therefore, this section will provide a brief overview of the use of Weibo, which includes patterns of daily use, motivations for Weibo use, and how do journalists identify themselves on Weibo.

6.1.1 Patterns of Daily Use According to the results from the interview, the participants in the study have similar patterns of daily use of Weibo which reflects a trend that the lines between work life and private life are increasingly blurred. One important reason for this is the nature of journalistic work, which is relatively flexible in terms of time. For instance, for two of the participants, Jin and Hui, the use of Weibo is not only out of personal needs, but also required by their work. As they are the digital editors for their organizations’ official Weibo accounts, they are responsible for updating Weibo posts for their organizations. Jin: The first thing I do after getting up from bed is not washing my face or brushing teeth, but starting the laptop and logging on Weibo to see what I should post on the official account of my affiliated organization. Hui: Actually I try to be online all the time to keep myself updated with news and information, and also manage the Weibo account for Honesty Outlook. Just like now, my cellphone is always in hand, no matter at work or in private life. Whenever I come 60

to a place like this bookstore or cafe, the first thing to do is to see if there is free Wi-Fi to connect to and to refresh microblogs. The other six participants also use Weibo frequently not only in their private lives, but also at work, mainly because Weibo has become an important source of news tips. Most of them find it difficult to tell how much time they spend on Weibo every day because they often use fragmented time during their daily routine, such as the time when they are having breakfast at home, on the way for interview, at the office, when stuck in traffic jam, etc. Yu: How much time? It’s hard to say. I log on to keep myself updated with news and information whenever I have time, especially when I am in the subway or on the bus. And it is both the first thing I do after getting up and the last thing before going to sleep. Maybe four hours per day. Qing: Actually I am using Weibo less actively now, and probably less frequently than my colleagues. I mainly use it on my way to work or in a break at the office, checking news or searching for news tips. Together one hour, perhaps. For these participants, Weibo is a kind of accompanying media, which can be accessed whenever they want and does not require attention for a long time. Only one participant, Xing, said that he does not use Weibo so regularly: Maybe I am a different type of Weibo user. When I am too busy or on travel for interviews, I may disappear from Weibo for several days. But sometimes I may spend hours on Weibo, seeking news leads, reading news and interacting with friends I know or do not know in real life. Similar to other participants, Xing’s use of Weibo also exhibits a tendency of blurred line between professional life and private life. Although he spends relatively focused time to use Weibo primarily for work, Xing also found it difficult to draw a clear line between the usage of Weibo for professional purpose and for personal purpose. This is also the case for Si: 61

“Sometimes I find it difficult to separate my use of Weibo for professional purpose from that for personal purpose. The boundaries between the private and professional has been blurred. At this moment I can be retweeting a news report by my colleague, and in the next minute I may discuss news with friends.” It can be concluded from the interviews that almost all the participants are heavy users of Weibo. Their time spent on Weibo use every day varied from an average of one hour to six hours. The use of Weibo has become not only a natural part of the daily routine, but also an essential part of the participants’ work. They use Weibo to check what is going on as well as to search for news tips regularly. In a word, Weibo has become another tool in their kit to enhance and augment traditional reporting practices. As mentioned earlier, Weibo has blurred the boundaries between public and private spaces. For journalists, especially those who choose to publicize their identity on Weibo, it is vital to consider the boundaries of their speech as it may reach a large audience. Moreover, they are expected to be as professional as they are in real life when they are on Weibo, because no matter how they perceive their role on Weibo, audiences would recognize them as professional journalists. However, the blurred line between work life and personal life means that it is more difficult for the journalists to maintain their professional role when they are on Weibo.

6.1.2 Motivations for Weibo Use The study reveals that the main motivations of the participants for using Weibo are for both personal and professional purposes: to get information, to share news, to express opinions, to communicate with friends, to expand social circle, and for entertainment. To find news leads and to get in contact with potential interviewees are also their major reasons of using Weibo. This is roughly consistent with the results from the previous survey on Chinese journalists’ social media use in 2011 (PR Newswire Asia 2011). It is worth noticing that there is a significant difference between journalists’ use of 62

Weibo and normal users’ use. Normal Chinese Weibo users often have a somewhat playful attitude towards Weibo. They usually say “wan” (“play” in Chinese) Weibo instead of “use” Weibo. Funny pictures, jokes, videos and entertainment news take up a relatively large part of the information they receive and share on Weibo. And playing games is also a part of their Weibo use. Compared to normal users, the participants in this study place more weight on information seeking and diffusion, communication and interaction. They have motivations closely related to their journalistic work, including seeking information, voicing for themselves and expanding influence. As Si and Hui expressed: Si: Unlike most of other users, I never play games on Weibo. My main purposes are to get information, to share all kinds of news, express my views, and to know more people. Hui: “I think the most important motivation is to voice for both myself and Honesty Outlook. Although the magazine was founded early in the 1990s, it wasn’t transformed into a market-oriented magazine until 2009. So actually the magazine is still quite young. The second motivation is to obtain news and information, and to find news leads. There are also some people who contact me voluntarily via private Weibo messages, such as those who want to petition. Another motivation is to contact interviewees through Weibo.”

6.1.3 How Do Journalists Identify Themselves on Weibo? This study reveals that although all the participants choose to publicize their identity as journalists and tweet openly on Weibo, they have used different strategies to construct their personal profile, and they tend to reveal their personal information to different extent according to their motivations of using Weibo. Weibo provides several elements of personal profile which users can choose to display on their homepage: basic information (including account name, place, gender, self-description, etc.), contact information, job information, education and tags. The homepage also displays the avatar, verification status, self-description, number of 63

other users the user is following, number of followers, and number of total posts by default. The table below is a summary of participants’ profile on Weibo: Name

Real

Verified or

name or

not

Self-description

Organization

following

followers

number

not

Xing

yes

Total

of posts

no

Related to

Southern

journalist

Metropolis

2111

87937

15608

1968

49914

64464

982

14258

3428

1238

4401

21651

931

1896

6726

1050

5703

1582

939

1226

5299

628

1221

1783

Daily (Beijing) Liang

Qing

Yu

Hui

Jin

Yuan

Si

yes

yes

no

yes

yes

no

no

yes

yes

no

yes

no

yes

no

Related to

China Youth

journalist

Daily

Personal

China

characteristics

Newsweek

Related to

Phoenix

journalist

Weekly

Related to

Honesty

journalist

Outlook

Related to

Beijing

journalist

Times

Personal

Beijing

characteristics

News

Personal

CBN

characteristics

Weekly

Figure 6 Profile of the participants (Note: All data were recorded in April 2014. ) 64

Among the eight participants, four of them (Liang, Qing, Hui, and Yuan) acknowledge their professional identity officially by using verified Weibo accounts. However, they manage their personal Weibo profiles differently. For instance, Hui, a journalist from Honesty Look, tweet openly with real name on his verified Weibo account. He uses a real picture of himself in interview scene as avatar, which gives viewers an intuitive impression that he is a journalist. In addition, he tries to give as much as information as possible by including most of the elements in his profile on the Weibo homepage, such as gender, place, education, and job information. And his self-description is as follows: “graduated from CUC (Communication University of China, a university noted in information and communication field in China), loves communication, and writes news articles, with strong sense of responsibility”. Through this brief self-description, Hui has made a specific self-presentation by sharing his professional education, occupation, and values. Thus it can be seen that Hui has a very strong desire of identifying himself as a journalist. Liang and Qing, who are verified with their affiliated organization and use their real names as well, have used sketches of their portraits instead of real photos, which seem less formal. As for self-description, Liang wrote, “an investigative journalist who has been in the field for 12 years and written a thousand poems, welcome to provide news leads”. Liang’s self-description emphasizes his role as a journalist and his accomplishments. Qing’s self-description is more about his principles of life: “not indifferent, but cannot be unhappy, do not urge others to drink or smoke”. Overall, Qing and Liang both include rather detailed profiles on the homepage and highlight their job information, which make their Weibo account credible. By contrast, Yuan, another verified journalist, tends to reveal less information about her job. Different from the above three journalists, Yuan is not verified as a journalist from her affiliated organization with real name, but instead verified as “media worker” with her nickname. Although she does also include job information on her homepage, she doesn’t specify the name of her affiliated organization, and simply puts “party newspaper”. In addition, her avatar is a picture of her with a mask covering her face. 65

Her self-description has nothing to do with her professional work. Thus it can be seen that, although Yuan is also verified as a journalist, she does not have an intention to build an image of a professional journalist on Weibo like the above three participants. It is noteworthy that, interestingly, according to the results of the interview, Yuan’s motivation of getting her Weibo account verified actually has nothing to do with her professional work. To some extent, she just wanted to use the verified account as a marketing tool to promote herself for reasons irrelevant to her work (to promote the public WeChat account she planned to launch to publish her essays and reviews). Moreover, she has deliberately withheld the name of her employer to avoid potential conflicts of interest. The other four participants (Jin, Si, Yu, and Xing), who are not verified Weibo users, have also adopted different strategies to selectively present aspects of their lives in the profile. Similar to Hui, Jin uses her real name and true avatar. Although she is not a verified user, she has claimed that she works in Beijing Times on her Weibo homepage. And she is self-described as “a journalist and an editor of the WeChat public account XXX”. Moreover, she has very complete profile, including her contact information, which makes her identity as journalist credible even though her account is not verified. Xing, a journalist from Southern Metropolis Daily, also has quite complete Weibo profile including specific job information, with his real name and non-real avatar. In his self-description, he highlights his contact information, which suggests that one important use of Weibo for him is for seeking information and contacting interviewees. And this is confirmed in the interview: “I have claimed the name of my organization in my profile, because I want others to know that I am a journalist and that the newspaper I work for is a responsible one. Then they will probably trust me and provide news leads for me.” Yu, a journalist working for Phoenix Weekly, uses his nickname on Weibo. He has used a picture of him in an interview scene as avatar, which tells that he is a journalist. 66

And his job information on Weibo homepage confirms this. He is self-described as “a journalist drifting in Beijing who loves new technologies and fast news”. Therefore, even though Yu does not use his real name, his detailed profile and self-description suggests that he is a real journalist. Unlike all the other participants, Si tends to reveal less information about her job or herself. Although she has claimed her affiliated organization, i.e., CBN weekly, she does not use her real name or real avatar. Her profile is not as complete as the other participants’ profiles. It only includes basic information and job information. In addition, her self-description does not explicitly say anything about her job as a journalist: “a skinny horse wanders in whipping”. Therefore, it can be seen that Si has no intention to emphasize her identity as a journalist in her Weibo profile. To summarize, most of the journalists tweet openly on Weibo, acknowledging their professional identity through different ways. And the main reason behind their publicity of identity is related to concerns about trust, credibility and transparency. However, a few journalists have deliberately withheld information about their real identity in order to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

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6.2 Transforming Journalistic Practices on Weibo This section presents results from the content analysis of participants’ Weibo posts and discusses to what extent they reflect traditional norms of being a professional journalist.

6.2.1 Overview of Journalists’ Weibo Posts According to the results of the study, there was an extreme variation in to what extent journalists used Weibo and in the activities they engaged as well. The relative productivity of the eight journalists in this study varied widely with a few of them posted far more than their peers. The most active journalist, Liang, sent about 48 posts per day, while Jin, who posted the least, only sent slightly more than 1 post a day. The majority of the participants sent less than 10 posts a day on average. A summary of the relative productivity for each participant is illustrated in the figure below:

Relative productivity Si

1.31

Yuan

3.25

Jin

1.27

Hui

4.31

Yu

relative productivity

12.72

Qing

2.04

Liang

47.86

Xing

9.57 0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

Figure 7 Relative productivity of the participants (Note: All data were recorded in April 2014. Relative productivity for each journalist was calculated by taking the total number of posts divided by the total number of days 68

being active on Weibo. These statistics may be smaller than the actual ones because the number of deleted posts is not taken into consideration.) Over the two-month coding period, i.e., from 1st to 30th of March and from 1st to 30th of April, the journalists in this study sent an average of 12 Weibo posts per day. That number also varied widely, with Qing sending 1 post a day and Liang sending about 54 posts per day on average. The table below displays a summary of the number of all the tweets posted by the journalists during the coding period and the number of those actually coded: Name

Total number

Number of

Number of

Proportion of

Number of

of posts

original posts

retweets

original posts

coded posts

(%)

Xing

393

62

331

15.8

250

Liang

3211

209

3002

6.5

295

Qing

60

50

10

83.3

60

Yu

515

218

297

42.3

300

Hui

547

60

487

11.0

260

Jin

189

56

133

29.6

189

Yuan

104

30

74

28.8

104

Si

100

34

66

34.0

100

Figure 8 Summary of posts by the participants (Note: All data were recorded in April 2014.)

6.2.2 Recurring Themes in Weibo Posts The results of the study reveals that an overwhelmingly majority of the eight journalists’ Weibo posts were aiming to convey information, which means that they 69

continue to play the major role of information providers when they migrate to the interactive online medium. The proportion of posts conveying information during the coding period ranged from about 70% to 90% for each journalist. The second most common purpose of their posts was to offer opinion, with a proportion of around 10% to 30%. In addition, four of the journalists (Xing, Liang, Yu and Hui) have used their posts to seek information about specific news events from other users. Liang, Qing, Yu and Hui have sent posts to gather opinion on certain news topics. However, such posts only take up a small part of their total posts. The proportions of posts with different primary purposes by the eight journalists are illustrated in the graph below:

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Xing

Liang

Convey information

Qing

Yu

Seek information

Hui

Jin

Offer opinion

Yuan

Si

Gather opinion

Figure 9 Proportions of posts with different primary purposes The posts by the journalists covered a wide range of topics including politics and current affairs, economy and business, entertainment and celebrity, sports and health, media and journalism, science and technology, life and style, popular culture and arts, education and so on. The results illustrated that all the journalists used Weibo for both personal and professional purposes. They have sent not only posts related to their work as journalists, but also information about their private lives. Furthermore, it was obvious that the participants in this study have exhibited an interest in presenting 70

themselves as professional journalists to different extents. According to the analysis of their Weibo content, the proportion of the journalists’ posts primarily conveying information related to their work, i.e., the posts labeled as “job talking”, varies significantly, as can be seen from the figure below: 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50%

Personalizing

40%

Job talking

30% 20% 10% 0% Xing

Liang

Qing

Yu

Hui

Jin

Yuan

Si

Figure 10 Proportions of posts labeled as job talking and personalizing It can be concluded from the statistics that Qing had the greatest tendency of presenting himself as a professional journalist despite the fact that he was not that active on Weibo. 43 posts (91.5%) were primarily conveying information about politics and current affairs, stories behind the news reports and his interview notes. Jin was another journalist who tended to present herself more as a professional journalist than a normal user on Weibo, with slightly more than two thirds of the sampled posts primarily conveying information related to her work, such as news of politics and life of journalists. Xing and Hui also had a majority (approximately 62%) of their posts sharing news in their reporting area and information about their work. Liang and Si, however, did not exhibit a clear tendency of presenting themselves as professional journalists or not. Both of them had around half of their posts related to journalistic work and the other half about their personal lives and feelings. 71

By contrast, Yu and Yuan tended to present more information about their private lives. As can be seen from the graph, only about 40% of Yu’s posts conveyed information about news and his life as a journalist, while more than half of his posts had nothing to do with his work. The most extreme case was Yuan. Even though she is a verified journalist, Yuan tended not to communicate as a journalist on Weibo. Almost of all her posts were irrelevant to her work. The topics most frequently mentioned by her were travel, music, movie, photography, food, all about her personal life. To conclude, although all the eight participants have publicized their identity as journalists, none of them present only professional aspect of their lives on Weibo, and Yuan has even exhibited a tendency of avoiding talking about her work. Analysis of the journalists’ discussions and interaction with other users further supports this conclusion. According to the results of the analysis, all the eight journalists have been active in interacting with other users, and they have engaged in discussions about various issues. Through identification of other users that the journalists have discussed with publicly on Weibo, it was found that most of the journalists not only discussed news topics or issues related to media and journalism with colleagues or scholars of media and communication, but also discussed matters of everyday life and topics not related to journalistic work with their friends. The only two exceptions are Qing and Yuan, with the former mainly discussed political news with scholars of media and communication, while the latter only discussed topics related to her personal life such as travel, photography, and food with friends in real life. Thus it can be concluded that most of the participants in the study tended not to present themselves purely as professional journalists in spite of their publicity of identity as journalists.

6.2.3 Negotiation of Professional Practices This section will present the results from content analysis of the participants’ Weibo posts and examine how they are adapting features of Weibo to their existing norms and practices and to what extent they need to negotiate journalistic professionalism. 72

Specific aspects that were considered are norms central to journalistic professionalism, including objectivity, gatekeeping, accountability and transparency. 1) Objectivity As Weibo has provided novel opportunities to express their viewpoints freely, journalists are more likely to swoop between two contradictory stances of what Calcutt and Hammond call “object-led empiricism” and “subject-driven idealism” (2011, 71). The study indicates that the eight journalists express opinions fairly frequently on Weibo just like other normal users, despite the fact that they would still be reluctant to include their personalized reporting in traditional media. All of them have sent posts interpreting news from individual perspectives and offering personal opinions, thus strayed from an impartial and neutral presentation of information. Some of them have used hashtags to indicate expression of opinion in posts so that they are differentiated from other posts. For instance, Qing and Hui often expressed their views on news events on Weibo using a hashtag #我有话说# (#I have something to say#). As mentioned earlier, posts primarily offering opinion (labeled as major opinion) account for about 10 to 30 percent of the total posts for the journalists in this study. However, there was considerable variation in how often the journalists expressed personal views, and on what topics. The posts by Si contained the most percentage of opinion, with about 30% indicating her views on topics mainly related to journalistic work, including economy, politics and journalism. Hui, Liang and Yu were also quite active in expressing their opinions, with a frequency of at least once per day on average during the coding period. The most frequently commented topics by the three journalists were politics, journalism, celebrity, and sports. These topics were also often commented by Jin, about one fifth of whose posts included personal views. The other three journalists, Xing, Yuan and Qing were the least likely to incorporate major opinions. Xing’s and Qing’s comments were mostly upon news topics that related to their work, while Yuan has mainly expressed her opinions on movie, TV and other matters in her private life. 73

Moreover, it is a common practice to add comments when sharing news. All the eight journalists have sent posts that primarily conveyed information but also contained at least one element of opinion (labeled as minor opinion). One possible reason for this is that news with personal interpretations may attract more audiences. In addition, expression of personal viewpoints has enabled some journalists to become opinion leaders. It can be argued that rational analysis of news events by journalists can guide public opinion, and skepticism against bureaucracy and state regulation may bring positive impact. However, posts expressing opinions on news topics can sometimes create problems, especially those biased posts displaying strong personal emotions and outrage. Although this is not an obvious problem for the participants in this study, it has been mentioned by them in the interview and will be further discussed later. To conclude, it can be seen that the conflicting role of objective news disseminator and commentator is strengthened on Weibo, and the line between news and opinions is blurring. Journalists have compromised their impartiality and tend to express their personal views when sharing news. 2) Gatekeeping According to a recent study on the opinion leaders online in China, journalists are one of the groups that are the most active in retweeting news and bringing significant influence on Weibo (Shen and Wu 2014). Journalists in this study have also been active in retweeting news shared by other users. As can be seen from Figure 8 above, for most of the journalists in this study, the number of original posts published by them only accounted for a small part of their total Weibo posts, which means that they have contributed more retweets than original content. The only exception is Qing, whose original posts made up approximately 83% of the total posts. However, he was not very active on Weibo and he has only sent 60 posts during the two-month coding period. By contrast, the extreme case is Liang, who has posted more than 3000 retweets in the same period, accounting for nearly 94% of his total number of posts. The proportion of retweets by the other six journalists were also more than half of the total posts, ranging from approximately 58% to 89%. 74

These journalists’ retweeting is a process that resembles the gate-keeping function identified by White (1950). By analyzing the selection of retweeting content, the study examines how the journalists deal with news and information shared by fellow users and to what extent they act as gatekeepers. According to the results, journalists still seek to remain gatekeepers, and they rarely open the gates to non-professional participants in the news production process on Weibo, even though Weibo is a highly participatory and interactive media platform. Analysis of the content of retweeting and identification of original sources suggest that all the journalists in this study tended to be cautious and rarely retweeted original news of politics or civic affairs generated by other ordinary Weibo users. The original sources of their Weibo retweets about serious news information were mainly the accounts of mainstream media organizations (such as Xinhua News Agency, CCTV News, Beijing News, People’s Daily, Legal Daily, etc.), popular new media sites (such as Sina News, Phoenix Internet Portal, etc.), journalists, and official accounts of institutions or organizations. In addition, some journalists (Jin and Hui) in this study also retweeted posts sent by their own organizations. Retweets of posts sent by general Weibo users were usually limited to those not related to serious news, such as information about everyday life, entertainment, celebrity, movie, music, travel and so on. To conclude, the study suggests that most of the journalists are retaining their traditional journalistic gatekeeping role by incorporating limited or no material from general users when sharing serious news, despite the fact that Weibo is a platform with a conversational and participatory nature. In this way, they are maintaining control over the information provided under their accounts and sticking to their traditional gatekeeper function. 3) Accountability and transparency According to Lasorsa et al. (2011, 26), posting information about journalists’ jobs and life of journalists can directly contribute to their accountability and transparency. 75

Journalists can also construct journalistic authority and strengthen their professional identity by strategically exposing the news production process (Zhou 2013). The study finds that almost all the journalists have posted news and information about what they were doing with their work, stories behind the news reports, their lives as journalists, and reflections on their work. The only exception is Yuan, who tended to act more like a normal user and included no content regarding her work.

Figure 11 An example of journalist’s post about stories behind news report For example, the screenshot above illustrates one of Liang’s posts, which reflected upon his report on the Lushan Earthquake a year ago. As some Weibo users suspected that the photo taken by him was a set-up because it seemed that the girl in it was reading the newspaper upside down, Liang has attached more photos and explained how he took the photos in detail in response to the doubts. His post clarified the misunderstanding, and it was well received by other users and colleagues. In this way, Liang not only provided accountability and transparency regarding how he conducted his work, but also built a professional image and strengthened his professional identity. This case also indicates that as audiences are now enabled to speak out and to talk back on social media, journalists are constantly being scrutinized. Thus being transparent and accountable has become increasingly important. Meanwhile, social media have offered new opportunities for journalists to provide accountability and 76

transparency. As suggested by Singer (2005, 187), another way of enhancing accountability and transparency to journalists’ professional work is to use hyperlinks, which suggests an increasing emphasis on the use of supporting evidence for statements of fact or opinion. The findings indicate that most of the journalists in this study used links extensively when sharing news or expressing their opinions in their original posts. Only Si, Jin, and Yu did not often provide links directly, but instead used quotations of news reports from media organizations or attached screenshots or photos of the original reports. An example of this can be seen in the pictures below:

Figure 12 An example of reference to news reports by screenshot Results of the study also indicated that there was a clear pattern in the links and references to news reports. The overwhelming majority of links and references led to other mainstream media sites and Sina news sites. The most often linked sites were Sina News, Xinhua News, Phoenix Internet Portal, and People’s Daily. Results also show that some journalists have sent posts linking to the sites of their affiliated news organization. For instance, Xing sometimes shared news reports from his organization (Southern Metropolis Daily) and commented on works by his colleagues. In addition, 77

journalists also occasionally provided links to foreign media sites, such as AP, CNN, Nanyang Sin-Chew Lianhe Zaobao, etc. To sum up, a majority of the links were linking to traditional elite media, rather than original user-generated content. By offering links or references to source materials such as original news reports, background information or related content, journalists provided more evidence supporting their statements of facts or opinion. In this way, they have enhanced their accountability and transparency.

6.2.4 Summary In conclusion, analysis of the journalists’ posts on Weibo suggests that microblogging is changing some journalistic conventions especially objectivity as journalists tend to deviate from their role as objective information providers by expressing their opinions and providing personal interpretation of news. Results also indicated that journalists are sticking to their traditional gatekeeping function by incorporating limited or no material from general users when sharing political, economic, or other serious news, despite that Weibo encourages participatory journalism. Moreover, journalists have enhanced their accountability and transparency by posting about how they conduct their work, sharing information about their lives as journalists, and offering links and references of original materials to support their statements of fact or opinion. Overall, most of the journalists to some extent appear to be adjusting professional norms and practices to their activities on Weibo despite some changes, particularly in objectivity.

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6.3 Factors Influencing Journalists’ Weibo Usage The study found that apart from individual journalist’s role perception, motivation of using Weibo, and other internal factors such as education, age, professional experience, and professional ideals, there are three external factors that influence journalists’ performance on Weibo: organizational influence, interaction with other users on Weibo, and governmental regulation.

6.3.1 Organization Influence Organizational attitudes towards the use of Weibo can have an influence on journalists’ performance online. In this study, Jin, Hui, and Xing reported that their organizations encourage the use of Weibo, only with some limitations, such as “avoid talking about matters related to the organization” and “do not publish aggressive speech or do anything that harms the reputation of the magazine”. By contrast, the other five journalists reported that their organizations have an either unclear or neutral attitude towards their use of Weibo. Results from the analysis of their Weibo content and the interview both indicate that, compared to the other five journalists, Jin, Hui and Xing tend to be more active in connecting with their organizations on Weibo. For instance, Jin interacts with the Weibo account of her organization, and reposts the news articles from her organization regularly; Hui often sends links to the official site of his organization; Xing also have sent posts linking to news articles both by himself and his colleagues. In this way, the journalists can not only promote themselves and popularize their work, but also attract more audiences for their affiliated organization. This also potentially strengthens their sense of achievement and satisfaction. It is worth mentioning that some news organizations encourage journalists to send posts containing news information that is censored on print media, which is a good tactic to fight against news control and can potentially bring positive changes. This is the case for Southern Metropolis Daily, a newspaper known for its investigative 79

reporting, as Xing said: “Our newspaper generally encourages us to use Weibo and acquiesces in the act of posting the main information of our news articles which cannot be published on the newspaper. Because newspaper is a social instrument, it wants to make information that is valuable for the society published through other channels when it cannot be published on newspaper.” This kind of practice can reduce the sense of frustration in front of censorship for journalists, and at the same time strengthen journalists’ organizational identity and professional identity. However, according to results from interviews, many news organizations have a paradoxical attitude towards journalists’ use of Weibo. On the one hand, news organizations are concerned about commercial profits and regard Weibo as an efficient tool to connect with and attract more audiences. On the other hand, they are also worried that journalists may publish something in conflict with their interests. For instance, news organizations may get in trouble when journalists’ Weibo touches upon sensitive political issues. Moreover, what is missing in the news organizations is established and formalized guidelines regarding journalists’ use of Weibo, which suggests general management ignorance. According to the participants, their organizations either do not care about journalists’ engagement in Weibo, or only have some simple rules which mainly request journalists not to publish any materials that bring the organization into disrepute. Considering that it is evident that some journalists have found it difficult to deal with the context collapse on Weibo, some specific guidance from the news organizations may be helpful.

6.3.2 Interaction with Other Users on Weibo As engaging with the audience is becoming more and more a defining feature of journalism, the concept of participatory journalism has become popular in academia 80

(Lasorsa et al. 2010). As Gillmor (2006, xxiv) suggests, the Internet allows news reporting and production to be “more of a conversation, or a seminar”, thereby giving “new voice to people who’ve felt voiceless”. The “people formerly known as the audience” has now become an important source of information, and they are able to talk back and provide feedback (Rosen 2006). Results of the interview and content analysis of their posts both revealed that Chinese journalists have been active in engaging with fellow users on Weibo. Most of the journalists in this study reported that they have used Weibo to find news leads and seek information from fellow users. They found that Weibo can be an effective tool to seek information, especially when they cannot be on the ground during emergent incidents such as conflicts or natural disasters. Half of the journalists have also sent posts to gather opinion on certain news topics or specialized subjects, for instance, genetically modified food. In addition, most of the journalists reported that they have been engaged in discussions of news events and civic issues with both friends and fellow users that they do not know in real life. However, a majority of their discussions are among colleagues, scholars of media and communication, and friends they know in real life, rather than ordinary Weibo users. Thus the degree of participation in the horizontal communication with general audiences is relatively low. One explanation of this is that journalists can accrue social capital through their status and links within the field of journalism, and strengthen their professional identity through the affirmation from their peers (Knight and Cook 2013, 101). In addition, interacting with peers can also help to trace news agenda in order not to be left behind. Another possible reason is that sometimes some fellow Weibo users, especially those anonymous unverified users, can be irrational when discussing news with journalists. Thus some journalists report that they have mixed feelings about interacting with their audience on Weibo. Four journalists (Liang, Hui, Qing, Xing) in this study reported that they have experienced intense debate with fellow users because of contradictory opinions, some of which even led to personal attack and caused trouble for their 81

organizations. For instance, Qing rarely discusses with fellow users now, because he found that they can easily become hostile: “I used to discuss news events with other users on Weibo very often. But later I found that discussion would usually turn into debate and quarrel, and lead to misunderstanding. Some users would attack with one-sided extreme interpretation. The result is that, the more you argue, the more unclear the matter becomes. ” Thus how to respond to and engage with fellow users has become a challenging problem for some journalists.

6.3.3 Governmental Regulation According to the results of interviews, paradoxically, Weibo has proved to be both a tool for journalists to fight against governmental control, and a sphere subjected to increasingly heavier governmental censorship. On the one hand, making the news production process visible on Weibo can be a means for journalists to protect themselves, to fight censorship, and to better perform their role as watchdogs. For traditional media in China, censorship works along with publication periods and news products are censored before going to print or broadcast. However, things become different on Weibo because the government can only censor Weibo posts after the posts are already published, and the posts can spread quickly and widely even if they are censored later on. Thus the rapid dissemination of information facilitated by Weibo has made it possible for journalists to distribute content that is censored on newspaper or magazine. As mentioned earlier, this kind of practice is to some extent encouraged by certain news organizations. In this way, journalists can better play the role of watchdog. There are a number of successful cases of investigative journalists exposing the crimes of governmental officials on Weibo. Si has provided one example: “For instance, Luo Changping (a journalist from Caijing Magazine) made allegations of corruption against Liu Tienan (the then deputy head of China’s top planning 82

agency) on Weibo and eventually led to the official’s downfall. This kind of allegation can never be made on newspapers because it will definitely be censored. Also I think that an important reason behind the success is that the public opinion on Weibo has formed great stress on the government and also protected him. However, one the other hand, the Chinese government has tightened censorship online since last year. A large-scale Internet crackdown campaign against online rumors was launched in August, 2013. The “little secretary” (“微博小秘书”) on Weibo has been more actively monitoring posts, filtering sensitive words, and censoring posts “not suitable for publication and dissemination”. A month later, some of the opinions leaders on Weibo were arrested and accused of spreading false rumors online (Buckly, 2013). Soon, the Internet crackdown has led to the decrease of Weibo usage. Governmental censorship has strongly influenced journalists’ performance on Weibo. Almost all the journalists in this study have mentioned in the interview about the fact that many journalists are less active on Weibo or even do not use Weibo any longer, because of the tightening of censorship. Qing is one of them. As can be seen from the previous statistics, he has tended to be quiet and sends fewer posts on Weibo. Yu and Jin also expressed that they tend to be more cautious and send less posts about sensitive issues on Weibo. The tightening of censorship has to some extent led to the self-censorship of journalists. Increasingly more journalists tend to communicate less about politics and current affairs, especially sensitive topics, and talk more about personal life and celebrity gossips.

6.3.4 To Verify or Not to Verify: That is a Question A very interesting finding of the study is that the process of verification on Weibo is reversible. For instance, in this study, Xing has endeavored to remove verification on his Weibo account. The reason behind this phenomenon is closely related to the three factors discussed above. As has introduced earlier, the advantage of a verified account is that it is more 83

authoritative and credible, as it shows the real identity of the user. Verification of account can help journalists build up a reputation on their association with news organizations and obtain more reach and influence. For some journalists, becoming a verified journalist on Weibo can also strengthen their professional identity. For instance, when asked about whether there was any change in his behavior on Weibo after he became a verified user, Hui answered: “One change is that I have certain expectation for myself, and I have a sense of responsibility of posting content on Weibo every day, otherwise I would feel that there is some task I haven’t finished. Because I think that as a professional journalist, I am responsible and obliged to voice myself through Weibo. It is also a way of realizing my journalistic ideals.” However, there are some drawbacks with verified accounts. For instance, Jin found that verified accounts are censored more often than ordinary accounts: “I have thought about verification. Actually my Tencent Weibo account is verified. But I use Tencent Weibo less frequently than Sina Weibo. I don’t want to verify my account now, because once your account is verified, you will easily get more attention and be more often under the surveillance of Sina.” Another problem with verified account is that people would easily associate the journalist with his news organization. In addition, sometimes when a journalist posts opinion that is distinctly different from that of the majority people or has clashing interests with other users, not only himself but also his organization can get in trouble. Hui has provided an example of this: “Once my comment on a case led to a war of words with a person involved in the case, and later, not only me but also my colleagues were harassed.” These are also the reasons why Xing has de-verified his Weibo account, as he expressed: “I have de-verified my account and just use my real name, because I don’t want other 84

people to associate me with my organization too much, and I don’t want to cause trouble for my organization when sometimes my view is distinctly differently from the mainstream view.” Thus it can be seen that despite the obvious benefits of verified accounts, whether or not to be verified on Weibo remains a question because of the potential problems coming from governmental regulation and interaction with other users. This also to some extent explains why some news organizations have a neutral or unclear attitude towards journalists’ use of Weibo, even though they are aware of the importance of grabbing the attention of more audiences online.

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6.4 Transforming Professional Norms on Weibo This section will analyze how Chinese journalists view values of journalistic professionalism on Weibo, and to what extent they need to negotiate professional norms based on the analysis of interviews and observations.

6.4.1 Context Collapse and Relevance of Journalistic Professionalism on Weibo Traditionally, journalists usually have a clear sense of their identity and boundaries of work. However, in context collapse, the boundaries between personal and professional are increasingly blurred. Is the adjustment of behavior in context collapse possible, impossible or irrelevant? Difficult This study shows that some journalists, especially the younger and less experienced journalists, have found it difficult to manage the context collapse and reconcile their personal Weibo use with professional use. Sometimes they are even caught in ethical dilemmas because of a clear perception of codes of conduct on Weibo. For example, in this study, Jin found it difficult to make a choice of how much of her personality to include on Weibo, especially when commenting on news: “Sometimes it is hard to strike a balance between personal expression and journalistic professionalism. When you see news that is very vile, such as the Kunming attack just happened several days ago, as an ordinary individual, it is inevitable to add some personal and emotional comments when sharing the news. But as a professional journalist, I have to think about whether that is appropriate, whether it will influence other users’ news judgment, whether I have looked at it comprehensively and objectively, and to what extent I can be personal.” Si has also faced the problem of conflict between the personal and professional: “One problem is that I am not sure how to control how much me to display on Weibo. 86

Sometimes I would post many things about my private lives, such as photos of travel and food, and my personal views on news topics as well. Then I would worry whether it’s too much me on Weibo, because after all I have claimed my organization in the profile and I may be expected to be more professional.” Hui also reported that he has experienced conflict between personal expression and journalistic professionalism and that it is difficult to strike a balance. Possible In contrast to the above three journalists, the other five journalists in this study do not have difficulties in adjusting their behavior in context collapse. One strategy some of them have used to avoid potential conflict of interest is to separate their personal and professional use of Weibo. And this is the case for Qing and Yuan. As mentioned earlier, Yuan, Qing, Liang and Hui are officially verified as journalists on Weibo, which seems to suggest that they have a stronger intention of identifying themselves as journalists on Weibo. However, among the four journalists, only Qing thinks that once being verified as a journalist on Weibo, he should be purely professional and the same standards of conduct in the press apply: “Once I am verified with real name, my Weibo account is no longer an ordinary one, but is closely connected to my identity as a journalist. And I have tried to apply journalistic professionalism to my activities on Weibo all the time.” This is consistent with the result that Qing had the greatest tendency of communicating as a professional journalist on Weibo as discussed in the earlier section. In contrast to Qing, Yuan tends to act more like a normal user on Weibo. Although she also uses Weibo for professional purposes, she has been avoiding mentioning anything about her daily work or workplace on Weibo: “I have been trying to separate my work from private life to make things simpler. I rarely post anything related to my work and never retweet posts from my organization. 87

I also use Weibo for work, but you won’t see it from my outputs on Weibo.” Another main reason why some journalists do not have difficulty in adjusting their behavior in context collapse is that they have a clear perception of the codes of conduct on Weibo. For instance, according to Liang, Weibo is just like the public space offline, and “what you need to do is just behave as responsible as you are in public space”. Xing and Yu, two journalists chose to publicize their identity as journalists by claiming the name their affiliated news organization in their profile, also have a clear sense of the codes of conduct on Weibo. However, contrary to Liang, Xing and Yu interpret Weibo primarily as a personal space rather than public, thus they have different standards of journalistic ethics on Weibo. As they expressed: Yu: “I have to stress that what I publish on Weibo has nothing to do with my affiliated organization. My understanding is that my Weibo account is primarily personal. But compared to ordinary users, I would pay more attention to the quality of the content, especially in terms of authenticity, because I am a journalist.” Xing: “I would not be limited by the identity as a journalist, because after all Weibo is to some extent a private space.” Relevance of Journalistic Professionalism on Weibo According to the results of the interviews, almost all of the journalists in this study reported that journalistic professionalism and ethics are a major concern when they communicate and interact on Weibo. The core journalistic values such as objectivity and gatekeeping are still important for them. However, they all think that there are some changes to the traditional norms and practices when journalism migrates to Weibo. Some journalists hold the view that, given the constraints of the new environment, the standards of journalistic ethics on Weibo are not necessarily the same as the traditional ones, and promote double standards, while some journalists think that even though the traditional norms and practices are challenged, they should stick to the same standards. 88

To summarize, the study finds that when navigating context collapse, some journalists tend to uphold the high standards at work (like Qing), some journalists lower their guards and try to signal what context try to signal what context they want to be in (like Juan), some journalists try to construct context through language and interaction (Liang, Yu and Xing), some are learning to manage their lives and adapt to the networked world where they cannot assume strict boundaries between distinct contexts (Hui, Si and Jin). While maybe we should not pass judgment on whether this is good or bad, it is important to explore how the journalists attempt to understand the tool, and reflect on this and think about how this may influence the development of journalism, rethink where journalism is going and what values are important.

6.4.2 Gatekeeping on Weibo When journalists’ news communication practices migrate to Weibo, there is no formal gatekeeping process as done traditionally in newsrooms any more. This has brought both new opportunities and challenges for journalists. On the one hand, journalists have gained more freedom and autonomy. They are able to express themselves more freely, with less organizational constraints. On the other hand, as gatekeeping has become a voluntary practice for journalists, whether and how journalists play the role of gatekeeper on Weibo becomes a question, as Yu described: “I would say that the journalistic ethics on Weibo is different from that on traditional media. Because the gatekeeping on content published on the paper is more careful, they have stricter rules. Once you make a mistake, people will remember it. But on Weibo, if you do something wrong, people will forget in three days. So I think Weibo has made it easier for some journalists to violate ethics.” It is somewhat pleased to find that all the journalists in this study agree that gatekeeping is still central to their values of journalistic professionalism according to the interviews. Moreover, some journalists have realized that one important change to traditional gatekeeping is that the audience can also act as gatekeepers by retweeting, as Si has observed: 89

“Actually besides the gatekeeping process by journalists, I think there is another form of gatekeeping, which is made by the users’ filtering practice. I know that some people would mainly read that news that is ‘most read’, ‘most commented’, or ‘most retweeted’ on Weibo.” Furthermore, Si and Qing do not have an optimistic view on this new kind of gatekeeping by the audience because they are worried that the audience’ own set of criteria about newsworthiness can be unreliable, thus it has become more prominent for journalists to remain gatekeepers and uphold their professional standards. Qing: “I found that users often tend to retweet posts that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs, not necessarily the posts that best present the news event. And this makes it easier for users to be more biased and the news information would be even more fragmented. So I think it is vital for journalists to remain gatekeepers and provide more complete reports to set news agenda.” Although all the eight journalists deem that it is vital to remain gatekeepers, they have rather different views on the ethical standards on Weibo, especially in terms of verification and accuracy. Qing and Yu think that the standard should be the same as the traditional one, while the other six journalists believe that the standard varies because the nature of content on Weibo is different. For instance, Qing and Xing had different views on this: Qing: I think it should be the same on Weibo. It’s important for journalists to stick to the gatekeeping role. My viewpoint is that journalists should go to the scene to verify and be cautious when retweeting. For me, I would always confirm the information before I post or repost it. Also I think it should be a common sense that if you send out a message, you have to make sure it's true. There are too many pieces of news information with unknown sources on Weibo. That’s why the term “request for rumor refutal”(#求辟谣#) is so popular now on Weibo. Xing: The common core value is that you have to be as accurate and objective as possible, but I think the standards are different. For instance, when you write news 90

reports, you can’t include information that is not verified or you are not 100% sure about its truthfulness. But on Weibo, I think it is allowed to post unverified information in cases that it won’t cause any harm and with the aim of bringing positive effect. While Qing’s view is more ideal, in practice, however, the cases are often closer to Xing’s view. It is evident that most journalists are adopting different standards in terms of verification and accuracy, which potentially poses challenges as will be discussed later.

6.4.3 Objectivity on Weibo Results of the study show that objectivity is one major professional norm that is transformed on Weibo. A comparison of the results from the content analysis and interviews find that there is a gap between their values of objectivity and their actual practices on Weibo. According to results from the interviews, all the eight participants believe that objectivity is still one of the important values in journalistic professionalism. However, as the analysis of their Weibo posts suggests, it is now a common practice for journalists to deviate from their role as objective information providers by expressing their opinions and providing personal interpretation of news on Weibo. And it is inevitable that some journalists would be emotional when they comment. Thus the conflict between personal expression and journalistic professionalism has become a great challenge for journalists. It can be argued that, while expressions with a little taste of the personal may attract more attention from the audience, too much personal and emotional expressions can undermine the credibility of journalists, and sometimes even have negative effect on opinion guidance, especially when the content is related to public interests and can influence other people’s judgment on news events, as Yu said: “While moderate personal expression may be beneficial for journalists to get a sense 91

of satisfaction or achievement, once surpassing this limit, it can have a negative effect on orientation of value. Weibo is after all a public platform, it’s not like you discuss with someone at home or privately. If you publish it, it may have an impact on others.” Hui has provided an example: Wang Mudi, a famous journalist from Guangdong TV station once attracted wide attention on Weibo because of a controversial post he sent. “He posted that, when he accompanied his girlfriend who had skin allergy for an injection in the hospital, it was unbelievable that the nurse failed three times to identify the blood vessel. And he said that he also wanted to kill people with a knife, and ended the post with an f word…There are already serious problems in the doctor-patient relationship. His post has undoubtedly caused a great uproar which makes the matter even worse. I am not sure how popular he is, but for many people, what they will remember is probably it was a journalist from some TV station who said something very inappropriate, and they won’t care who he is.” Another example is illustrated by Xing: “During the several days after the incident of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, few journalists publish any valuable in-depth reports or rational comments on it. What you could see on Weibo was all sensational comments with prayer and candles, saying ‘hope they can come back safely’, which had a significant negative effect on the passengers’ families. This is really abominable because you are making delusive hope, even though you clearly know that there is no chance for them to return.”

6.4.4 Accuracy on Weibo Accuracy is another professional norm that is transformed on Weibo. While the eight journalists in this study generally agree that accuracy is an important goal, they have reported that their actual experiences on Weibo to some extent discourage rigorous fact checking. The instant information communication online has made the conflict between timeliness and depth of news reporting more prominent. How to negotiate 92

between the speed of information publication and the accuracy of information becomes a key issue for journalists. For traditional media, there is time to do gatekeeping and verification before publishing because of the cycle time limitation. However, for journalists on Weibo, balance between speed and accuracy is more difficult as communication online can be 24 hours without gaps. According to the interview, it is common for journalists to be caught in such dilemma, as Xing said: “I believe it is a dilemma for some journalists particularly for those doing in-depth reports. The hot topics on Weibo change so quickly. Chances are that when reporting an emergent event, if you want to get it all accurate, you will be really late to publish it, and then few people would care about it.” How to deal with the dilemma is a great challenge for journalists, especially the less experienced ones. For instance, Jin found it difficult to deal with retweeted posts: “For me, how to verify the information is a challenge, especially when it’s out of my reporting area. It is not possible to verify every post I retweet.” Results from the analysis of Weibo posts and the interviews both suggest that the journalists tend to repost news from mainstream media organizations with greater credibility and influence. For Jin, one important reason behind this is that it is less likely for these organizations to publish false information than other ordinary ones. And she has provided an example: “Take the MH 370 incident which just happened as an example, I often repost the updates by CCTV and People’s Daily. An hour ago, I reposted a piece of news from Chengdu Evening News saying that the flight has already landed, which turns out to be false information, and soon the post is deleted. So I tend to choose the media with greater credibility or influence.” While the young journalists found it a challenging task to do fact-checking in order to ensure the accuracy of news, the more experienced journalists see more opportunities in terms of verification of news. For instance, Xing found that Weibo has enabled journalists to get to know the provider of the news tips by checking his or her profile 93

and posts on Weibo thus make better judgement about his or her motivation of releasing the information. In addition, Weibo has also made it easier and more convenient for journalists to compare information from multiple sources by searching key terms related to the news events. Moreover, Xing has provided some tips about posting unverified news information: “One strategy of publishing unverified but potentially useful information is to tell other users that you are not certain. And if you are wrong, apologize immediately. I think it is always better to be skeptical and not to publish unverified content.” Moreover, while none of the journalists in this study report that they have involved in generating and spreading false rumors on Weibo, they all agree that publishing news on Weibo without verification was not uncommon among Chinese journalists. For instance, according to Liang’s observation, since there is so much fragmented information on the Internet, and basic news materials can be gathered online, some journalists have become more opportunistic and they just copy and paste what they found online without verification by doing investigation and interview by themselves. This is particularly common when major incidents happen, as Liang observed: “Especially when major incidents happen, some journalists tend to post information without verification on Weibo, mainly because they do not want to miss the opportunity to be the first to report the news. This has led to large amounts of unverified information circulating on the Internet.” Once published on Weibo, false information can spread rapidly even if it is soon deleted, as Hui expressed: “What distinguishes Weibo from traditional media is that once a piece of news is posted, it can be seen by a lot of people and get reposted. Even though it would be censored by Sina after it is posted, it would have an impact to certain extent.” The publishing of false information can have significant negative impacts, particularly in the context of crisis events or major incidents. An example is provided by Hui: 94

“…several days ago, a grapevine about the Kunming attack saying that ‘except the one happened in the railway station, there were knife attacks in many other places in Kunming as well’ was posted on Weibo. Later, a journalist from Oriental Morning Post reposted the post without verifying it. I saw the news an hour before he reposted it, and did not account it as truth. But since the journalist reposted the news with his verified Weibo account, some of the users would regard it equivalent to news officially published by his affiliated organization. Although Oriental Morning Post clarified that the information was untrue, it still has caused some negative effect.” Moreover, the credibility of both the journalists’ and their employer’s will be questioned if they post content which later proves to be false. And journalists like Liang in this study are worried that the irresponsible practices of posting unverified news may lead to the loss of public trust in journalists.

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7. Discussion and Conclusions This chapter will review the main results of the study and discuss the implications of them.

7.1 Summary of the Results This study has examined how Chinese journalists use Weibo and to what extent journalistic practices and norms are transformed in context collapse. According to the results, as Weibo has blurred the boundaries between public and private spaces, journalists tend to keep a mixed identity, with blended personal and professional values, attitudes and behavior. The journalists have been adapting and redefining traditional norms to their routines and practices on Weibo. This has confirmed Mitchelstein and boczkowski’s (2009) observation that journalistic practices and norms are changing through a mutual shaping process of technological tools and the journalists who enlist them in their everyday work.

7.1.1 Journalistic Practices on Weibo An analysis of the journalists’ posts suggests that for most of the journalists, Weibo has been incorporated into their daily reporting practices. They continue to play the role of information disseminator when they migrate to the new media format. And many journalists are normalizing Weibo to fit in with their existing values and norms. While it is evident that journalists are deviating from their role as objective information provider by expressing opinions and providing personal interpretation of news on Weibo, traditional journalistic norms such as gatekeeping, accountability and transparency are applied and enhanced on Weibo. This has confirmed Hermida’s (2012, 325) conclusion that just as social media is reshaping journalism, journalists are themselves engaged in forming and shaping acceptable and accepted professional practices on social media.

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7.1.2 Negotiation of Journalistic Professionalism on Weibo The study shows that most of the journalists believe that the core journalistic values, such as objectivity and gatekeeping, are still important for them when they communicate and interact on Weibo. Most of them use Weibo within the boundaries of traditional practices and norms. However, they all think that the boundaries are shifting when journalism migrates to Weibo, because the nature of news content on Weibo is different from that on traditional media. Their changing views on standards of journalistic professionalism confirms Donna Chu’s (2012, 385) conclusion that the meaning of professionalism is far from fixed, but is instead subject to constant interpretation. Objectivity and accuracy are two of the core values of professionalism that journalists need to negotiate on Weibo. The realization of these values is sometimes difficult in the fluid and contingent online environment. It is evident that there is a gap between their values and practices. As Skjerdal (2011, 740) suggests, the implementation of journalistic professionalism is subject to social adjustments and changes in media format.

7.1.3 Summary The study is by no means perfect, with such a small sample. However, it has served its purpose as an attempt to get some semblance of Weibo usage among Chinese journalists. It has highlighted important features of Chinese journalists’ Weibo usage. It has also provided empirical evidence to examine the transformation of journalistic practices and norms in a new environment, thus it furthers the understanding of how Chinese journalists and journalism are being affected by Weibo and contributes to the continuing debates on the changing horizons of journalism in the social media era. Overall, previous research into journalists’ social media usage has largely focused on the analysis of content (Singer 2005; Lasorsa et al. 2011; etc.). By contrast, this study has examined the ways in which Chinese journalists are using Weibo by combining 97

analysis of content and in-depth interviews, thus it also furthers the understanding of the relationship between the journalists’ values and their actual practices. The results of the study are valuable for understanding the relationship among journalism, new media and the society. The implications of Chinese journalists’ practices on Weibo will be further discussed below.

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7.2 Implications of the Results 7.2.1 Implications for Journalists and Journalism As social and professional lives are now interlocked in a way they never were before (Knight and Cook 2013, 181), it has become a tough balancing act for journalists to know how to separate and integrate personal and professional lives on social media, or they can be caught in ethical dilemmas. The negotiation of professional norms and practices among Chinese journalists on Weibo indicates that social media have made some contradictions in journalism more prominent, such as timeliness versus depth of new reporting, objective news presentation versus commentary, and so on. The roles, norms and practices of journalists online have become increasingly fluid. It is evident that social media have posed some challenges to journalistic norms especially in terms of accuracy and objectivity. Context collapse has made it more difficult to uphold traditional standards and practices. However, the fundamental aspects of journalism remain the same. For journalists, it is important to stick to the core values of journalism even though the standard on social media can be slightly different from that on traditional media. This is also crucial for the survival of traditional journalism. As Calcutt and Hammond (2011, i) argue, “journalism is at a crossroad: it needs to reaffirm core values and rediscover key activities, almost certainly in new forms, or it risks losing its distinctive character as well as its commercial basis.” Meanwhile, the new media technologies have also brought news tools and opportunities for doing journalism. Weibo has provided journalists unprecedented new ways of sourcing news, verifying information, engaging with the audience, and self-presentation and self-promotion. As one interviewee, Xing said at the end of the interview, “perhaps the media is in crisis, but I believe that right now is the best time for journalists.” In short, both journalists and journalism are transforming and evolving along with the 99

changes happening in the technological and culture scenes. While it is important to take advantage of the new tools and adapt to the social media environment, it is equally and perhaps even more, important to uphold core values of journalistic professionalism when both social media and journalism are undergoing a revolutionary phase.

7.2.2 Freedom of Expression: A Comparison between China and the West As can be seen from the results of the interview, there are almost no formal restrictive regulations on journalists’ use of Weibo in the eight participants’ affiliated organizations. Only three of the eight participants reported that their organizations have some simple rules regarding their use of Weibo, which mainly request them not to publish materials that bring the organizations into disrepute. In this study, most news organizations have an unclear or neutral attitude towards journalists’ use of Weibo, while some news organizations encourage their journalists to use Weibo because it can be a way to attract a larger audience and to raise profits. Admittedly, with such a small sample size, the conclusion may not be generalized to the entire news organizations in China. However, since the eight participants’ affiliated organizations are representative mainstream newspapers and magazines which are popular and widely recognized, it can be viewed as highly indicative of what is occurring within traditional news organizations in China. A tentative conclusion can be drawn from the results of the study is that there seem to be a lack of formal written rules to restrict journalists’ use of Weibo in China. This is very different from the case in Western countries where many news organizations have established guidelines to regulate their employees’ behavior on Twitter or Facebook. These guidelines have focused on issues of professional/personal balance and codes of conduct on social media platforms, including detailed guidance on expressing personal preferences, discussing personal lives, and verifying news information online. For instance, Reuters has very specific guidelines on reporting from the Internet and 100

using social media, which are stated under the category of “Specialized Guidance” in its Handbook of Journalism (2013). According to the guideline, the same standards of sourcing, identification and verification apply when reporting online, and journalists must consider principles of professionalism before tweeting or posting (Reuters 2013). The guidelines from Washington Post also clearly state that “Washington Post journalists are always Washington Post journalists” no matter when they are using social networks for reporting or for personal lives, and that disclaimers about “personal” content do not exempt journalists from professional standards (2011). Moreover, the guidelines proscribe the postings of anything that “could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other boas or favoritism” (The Washington Post 2011). However, does this necessarily mean that journalists in China have gained more autonomy and granted more freedom of expressions than their western counterparts when using social media? On the one hand, it is true that Weibo has to a large extent improved that scope of news reporting in China, and makes it possible to publish contents censored on traditional media. On the other hand, however, the question is more about whether and to what extent Chinese journalists are interested in publishing such contents on Weibo. As mentioned above, although there is management ignorance in traditional news organizations, Chinese journalists’ behavior on Weibo is subject to governmental censorship. Since 2013, the government has tightened up its censorship online in the name of cracking down rumors, which has led to the self-censorship of journalists, while having no obvious positive effect on regulating journalists’ behavior online. Journalists are less likely to touch upon sensitive topics on Weibo and to perform as watchdogs. On the contrary, some journalists even tend to be interested in posting any news information that is eye-catching without considering whether it violates traditional journalistic values or not. Therefore, it is clear that journalists’ practices on Weibo are still to a large extent influenced by political and economic values. This confirms Boczkowski’s (2004) view that the newswork and journalism change through a process of adaption that is mutually shaped by 101

socio-cultural and technological constraints and considerations. In conclusion, although the rise of journalists’ Weibo may have introduced new and uncertain elements to the struggle between the political and economic values, and journalistic professional ideals, whether Chinese journalists will make good use of Weibo remains a question worthy of further exploration.

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7.3 Limitations and Suggestions All research has its limitations, so does this one. First, as this is a qualitative study drawn on a sample of a limited number of interviews with journalists, it is unlikely that the study results can be generalized to a larger population. It would be better to include participants with a wider variation in terms of demographic background and usage of Weibo. Future studies in this direction may consider conducting qualitative studies examining more journalists with more diversified backgrounds. Quantitative studies involving a large scale of surveys can also be conducted based the results from this study. Also it would be interesting to examine those journalists with larger number of followers and enjoying greater popularity because their self-presentation on Weibo can have more significant influence on the audience. Furthermore, in order to conserve resources, this study only examined participants’ use of Weibo during a two-month period in 2014. To provide a more complete picture of journalists’ content and activities on Weibo, a sample of longer period is needed to capture the continuous updates. In addition, the logic of sampling single posts as the unit of analysis can be problematic because sometimes posts are written in a series due to the limitation of length of 140 characters. As it is a common practice for journalists to update news stories using live-tweeting with several posts, the meaning of a post can be dependent on previous posts. Future content analysis of microblogs may take this into consideration. Despite these limitations, the findings of this study has offered a snapshot into the young generation of Chinese journalists and sheds light on how they are using Weibo, and how they are negotiating their professional norms and practices in a new media format that has blurred the boundaries between the private and professional. Focusing on Chinese journalists, this study adds to a growing body of literature on the adoption and use of social media in traditional news production.

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APPENDIXI Interview Guide

1. Demographic information Gender, age, education, working experience 2. Social media use When did you start using social media? What other social media platforms do you use except Sina Weibo? Why did you start using them? How much time do you spend on them? How often do you use them? What do you use them for? How do you use them? Can you describe how do you use social media on a typical day? 3. Use of Weibo 3.1 Profile Does your organization have any rules about staff’s use of Weibo? If so, could you specify? Do you use true avatar and real name on Weibo? Why or why not? Why do you choose to publicize your identity of journalist? Are you a verified user? If so, when and why do you choose to be one? If not, why not and have you considered applying for verification? Do you think it is different to be verified? What is the difference? Are you/ Would you be more careful with your language, wording, standpoint or 117

content posted on Weibo after verification? Why or why not? 3.2 Content What news and information do you often post on Weibo? Where are these news and information from? When sharing news, do you often provide links of background information? Do you share your personal life on Weibo? How often? Do you think that would influence your image of professional journalist? What kind of content do you repost? What kind of news and information do you retweet more? Do you verify the news when retweeting news shared by other users? How? Do you comment on news when retweeting? When commenting, how personal are you? Do you stand only for yourself? 3.3 Interaction and activities Do you look for news tips through Weibo? What kind of information and news do you often get from weibo? Do you discuss about news events very often on Weibo? With who? 4. Management of Context Collapse Can you clearly distinguish personal conduct from professional conduct on Weibo? Do you think there is a need to separate work account from personal account? Are your activities on Weibo related to your affiliated organization? If so, how? If not, why not? Do you comply with journalistic professionalism when you communicate and interact on Weibo? Would you consider journalistic ethics? How often? Why? Do you think it is OK for a journalist to be very personal and emotional on Weibo 118

since it is a platform which allows for diversified expression or do you think it is problematic? Can you give an example? Do you think you are responsible for the truthfulness of the news when you repost it? Why or why not? What is your fundamental motivation of using Weibo? 5. Journalistic practices and norms on social media Some say that social media have brought challenges to traditional journalistic practices and norms, what do you think about that? How to deal with that? Do you have any examples of your own or from others? Do you think journalists should comply with all the traditional journalistic ethics on social media? Why? What ethics do you value most?

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APPENDIXII An Example of Interview Transcript

Time: 2014-3-9 10:00 Place: Zebra Bookstore, Beijing Interviewee: Hui

Do you mind me recording the conversation? No. Do you have any question regarding the research question? Not really. The aim of my research is to … Hm. Shall we start? Yeah. OK. First I want to know your basic information. How old are you? I am 27. You studied communication before? Yeah, from 2004 to 2008, in Communication University of China. Now you are a journalist in Honesty Outlook? How long have been working for the magazine? About three years. 120

Were you also a journalist before that? Yeah, I had also worked in the News Channel of China Central Television before. What kind of news do you report then? Also political news and current affairs? Yes. Our interview includes four parts. First… Then…We start with the first part. So, what kind of social networking sites do you use? I mean like Renren, Weibo… Mostly Weibo and WeChat, I also use some other popular sites such as Renren, Douban, and so on. It seems that WeChat is getting more and more popular now, is it? Yeah, I think it is since last year. Now almost all my friends use WeChat. Many people have public account, which is a good choice for Me-media. Do you have a WeChat public account? Yeah, but I only update it about once a month, haha… Do you use any other microblogging services except Sina Weibo? Yeah, I also have a Tencent Weibo account, but I rarely use it. Why not? How do you think it is different from Sina Weibo? I think most people choose Sina Weibo. It started earlier after all. I only use Tencent Weibo to check for some special information. I don’t follow many people and I have very few followers on it. When did you start using Weibo? At the beginning of 2010, I think. How long do you use social media every day? Could you describe how do you use it on a typical day? Actually I try to be online all the time to keep myself updated with news and 121

information and also manage the Weibo account for Honesty Outlook. Just like now, my cellphone is always in hand, no matter at work or in private life. Whenever I come to a place like this bookstore or cafe, the first thing is to see if there is free Wi-Fi to connect and refresh microblogs. So to what extent is your use of Weibo related to your work? Well, it is hard to say, maybe most of the time. But I also use Weibo for entertainment, such as finding some funny gif pictures. Does your affiliated organization support your use of personal Weibo account? Is there any rules or guidelines? Yeah, the general rule is that it would be in favor of our using of Weibo as long as we do not publish aggressive speech or do anything that harms the reputation of the magazine. But there are no specific guidelines. I noticed that you use your real name and image on Weibo, why? I have been using my real name since I started using Weibo. Mainly for two reasons: the first is that it is easy to remember, because I have a poor memory, I cannot remember too many nicknames; the second reason is that it would be convenient for others to find me by simply searching my real name. You have also specified the organization you are working for and get verification from the Sina Corporation, what are the main considerations for this? When did you become a verified Weibo user? (Laugh) Actually the verification by Sina is not that serious. At first it pays for certain celebrities to use Weibo so that it can attract more users, these celebrities are now called big Vs (celebrities with verified Weibo accounts). I have a friend who was working at Sina when I first got this job at the magazine, so the verification process for me is very simple. The main reason for this is similar to using real name, i.e. to make it easy for others to find me on Weibo. Meanwhile, it is beneficial for expanding my social circle and influence, not only for myself, but also for the magazine. I have 122

found it quite obvious that the number of my followers rose quickly right after my account was verified. Another factor of the increasing of followers is probably the publishing of influential articles in the magazine. Is there any change in your Weibo usage habit after you become a verified user? I mean, for example, in terms of wording, tone, content, standpoint, etc. Er, not really, I don’t think I have changed much in terms of wording or tone. But one change is that I have certain expectation for myself, and I have a sense of responsibility of posting content on Weibo every day, otherwise I would feel that there is some task I haven’t finished. Because I think that as a professional journalist, I am responsible and obliged to voice myself through Weibo. It is also a way of realizing my journalistic ideals. So what kind of content do you often post on Weibo? I mean original content, not including reposts. Most of my posts are all kinds of news related to my work. When you post news, do you often provide links of related material? Yeah, sometimes. Do you post anything about your own personal life? Not much, sometimes I post something about football, because I love football. What kind of content do you often repost? Mainly related to news and information which are useful for my work, some can be potential news leads. And a majority of them are about anti-corruption cases. Do you comment when you repost? I used to like to add comments when I repost news, but now I don’t comment that often. Why is that? What changed? 123

I used to think that it would be good to express some opinions which can reflect the sense of justice as a journalist. Later I found that even though I tried to avoid being too personal and make the comments more objective, they would attract insults and attack on Weibo. At first I thought I could simply ignore them, but then I found that doesn’t work because that would even affect my affiliated organization and colleagues. They would cause trouble for your organization and colleagues because of your speech on Weibo? Yeah, once my comment on a case led to a war of words with a person involved in the case, and later not only myself but also my colleagues were harassed. So that is the main reason why you comment much less now. Yeah, and also I think that an individual won’t make that big difference on Weibo, unless you are someone really famous like those big Vs. Then would you feel a sense of powerlessness? Yes, exactly. That’s why I feel less motivated to comment now. Do you often discuss news with other users on Weibo, except the war of words you mentioned? Yes, I used to discuss with other users very often, but less now. What kind of people do you often discuss with? Can you give an example? Yeah, mainly journalists and scholars of media and communication, I think. For example, I have interacted with Lüqiu Luwei on Weibo. So most of activities on Weibo are basically related to your work? What about the news and information you get from Weibo? Yes, kind of. But sometimes I also use Weibo for entertainment and amusement, as I said earlier. 124

Then how do you define your role on Weibo? A professional journalist, a normal user, or…? That’s a good question. Actually I have been thinking about this question since I started using Weibo, who am I on Weibo, a professional journalist, or what? So Weibo has brought a kind of role confusion to you. How do you deal with that? At the beginning I regarded myself as a professional journalist on Weibo, but now I tend to be an individual, a natural human being. How do you balance between the role of a journalist and your personal identity? I have always been seeking for it, but it is really hard to strike a balance. What about journalistic values and norms, would you consider them whenever you communicate on Weibo? Yes, all the time. So you still use the standard of a professional journalist even though you regard yourself as a natural human being? Yeah, I think so. Do you think it is good or bad for a journalist to be very personal on Weibo? Well, it depends. Moderate personal expression may make the posts more attractive and also shows your personality. But if you are too personal and emotional, it would affect the credibility and impact of your Weibo, as well as the value of a journalist. Moreover, it would influence your professional image. For me, I think this way of doing does not make full use of the platform of Weibo, it’s a kind of… Waste of resources? Yes, precisely. Have you encountered a situation in which there is a conflict between personal expression and journalistic professionalism? 125

Yeah, sometimes. I think it can be seen as a kind of dilemma. Can I understand it as one reason behind your change of role perception on Weibo? Er, kind of. What are your fundamental motivations of using Weibo? I think the most important motivation is to voice for myself and for Honesty Outlook. Although the magazine was founded very early, it wasn’t transformed to a market-oriented one until 2009. So the truth is that the magazine is still quite young. The second is to obtain news and information, and to find news leads. There are also some people who contact me voluntarily via Weibo private message, such as those who want to petition. Another is to contact interviewees through Weibo. How is the response rate? Acceptable, I would say. For instance, I have contacted and interviewed Cao Lin from China Youth Daily. So your main motivations of using Weibo are still related to your role as a journalist? Yeah, but I also regard Weibo as a channel to release myself and vent emotions sometimes. But that is just a minor part, right? Yes. Some people think that Weibo, this platform for personal expression, is challenging the traditional journalistic practices and norms. Do you have any thoughts about that? I think that’s a good point. The impact on traditional journalistic practices is without doubt. I would say that traditional journalistic norms are also challenged indeed. And I believe that it would evolve a new set of journalistic values, norms and ethics. How is that specifically? Can you explain more about it? Yeah, I think one important aspect is the verification of news and information. What 126

distinguishes Weibo from traditional media is that once a piece of news is posted, it can be seen by a lot of people and get reposted. Even though it would be censored by Sina after it is posted, it would have an impact to certain extent. For example, several days ago, a grapevine about the Kunming attack saying that there were knife attacks in many other places in Kunming as well except the one happened in the railway station was posted on Weibo. Later a journalist from Oriental Morning Post reposted the post without verifying it. I saw the news an hour before he reposted it and did not account it as truth. But since the journalist reposted the news with his verified Weibo account, some of the users would regard it equivalent to news officially published by his affiliated organization. Although Oriental Morning Post clarified that the post was untrue, it still has caused some negative effect. Yeah, I have heard of it. I believe that his repost has to some extent aggravated the panic of people. But how did you verify the news? Why did you think it was not true? Well, I have checked up the source of the information and found that the Weibo account was not credible because it had spread rumors before. Hum, that is an effective way to verify the news. Back to the main question, what else do you think is a challenge to traditional journalistic practices and norms? I think probably in terms of personal and emotional expression, which may violate the principle of objectivity and fairness. I don’t know if you have ever heard about Wang Mudi before. He is a journalist from Guangdong TV station. Yeah, he is a host and producer. I have watched his TV program Larry's Eyes on Finance. Actually I didn’t know him until a couple of days ago. One of his posts has attracted wide attention on Weibo. I didn’t know that. What was it about? He posted that when he accompanied his girlfriend who had skin allergy for an injection in the hospital, it was unbelievable that the nurse failed three times to 127

identify the blood vessel, and he said that he also wanted to kill people with a knife, and ended the post with an f word. I wouldn’t expect him to do such a thing. You know there are already serious problems in the doctor-patient relationship. His post has undoubtedly caused a great uproar which makes the matter even worse. I am not sure how popular he is, but for many people, what they will remember is probably it is a journalist from some TV station who said something very inappropriate, and they won’t care who he is. That is what journalists should know. Do you have any other thoughts about journalistic norms online? Er, I think another point is that journalists on Weibo can be more lack of humane care. For instance, in the Xia Junfeng case last year, a journalist found his son through Weibo and posted related information on Weibo, which caused the swarming and spectating of media, and even led to attack and harm on his son. All this could have been avoided if news were published only on traditional media. So is the case of Tang Hui. Journalists did not adequately protect the privacy of her daughter, who was a minor, and published her daughter’s photos and personal information on Weibo. That is a violation of the journalistic ethics and even a violation of the law. Exactly. I think it’s very serious on Weibo. Some journalists even intentionally disclose and exaggerate related details of litigants in order to attract attention. From my perspective, one important difference between Weibo and traditional media is that Weibo makes it easy for people to manifest their own nature, regardless of journalists or anybody else. In print media, the speech is printed in black and white, which is more official, thus journalists would be more cautious in terms of language and wording. While on Weibo, many journalists seems to have forgotten the journalistic ethics they ought to follow. That is interesting. The same person can act quietly differently on different platforms. 128

Yeah. Also I noticed that among the people I have contacted, it is obvious that those who have studied journalism are significantly different from those who haven’t. They would be more careful. Journalists who did not study journalism tend to be more easily emotional and even extreme when they express their opinions. So you think that educational background is one factor behind the difference? Yes. And I think one important change you should have noticed is that now many journalists tend to speak less on Weibo. I think it was since September 2013? Is it because more people are turning to WeChat? Yeah, I believe the rise of WeChat is only one factor, the main reason is the increasing censorship and the crackdown on users, especially the big Vs who spread rumors on Weibo. Since then journalists don’t dare to speak out like before and tend to be less active. Now even when unexpected major events happen, they won’t attract such a high level of attention on Weibo as they were before. You can see that the main accounts which concentrating on publishing news on Weibo are the official accounts of all kinds of media organizations. The government still wants to make Weibo become the platform for promoting mainstream opinion. This is what the official account of People’s Daily is doing actively on Weibo. Have your Weibo account been censored by Sina? No. But I found several times that the posts I retweeted were soon deleted by Sina. I think the censorship on Tencent Weibo is much loose. There are less sensitive terms on Tencent Weibo. Sometimes when I found that a certain word was censored, I would turn to Tencent Weibo. Maybe that’s because Tencent Weibo has less influence. Few people I know use it. Yes, I think so. The government thinks that Weibo has a broader impact, so they have strengthen the censorship. When I interviewed Cao Lin, he mentioned that one of his friends working in Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has a special task 129

which is to monitor his Weibo. I think it might be interesting to look at whether and how the journalists act differently before and after September 2013. Yeah, that can be an interesting topic.

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APPENDIXIII

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